Uneven Odds
by Le'letha
Summary: An unexpected exposé leads to the forced merger of the human and demon worlds. The Reikai Tantei set out to prevent Armageddon: they have failed. Desperate times call for judicious risktaking.
1. In the Next Eleven Seconds

_**Uneven Odds**_

_**Le'letha**_

**Summary: **They set out to prevent Armageddon; they have failed. Ancient secrets emerge…the balance of the multiverse tips…desperate times call for judicious risktaking.

**Warnings: **_Everyone is going to die and the world is going to end._ If you can't handle that, I'm very sorry for disturbing you. Le'letha takes no responsibility for people who keep on anyway. You've been warned (that's _why_ it's called a warning). Technically Alternate Universe, because I know this never happened in the canon YYH universe; currently rated T, but **RMR**—rating may rise. Readers will be informed if/when the rating goes up. My stories keep secrets, so I don't know for sure.

**Author's Note: **The usual rules apply: anonymous readers & reviewers (anonymice?) are welcome; in the words of the window washer, _all_ will be made clear; feel free to constructively criticize; flame me and I'll get you with a fire hose. I will, too.

**Disclaimer:** Do I own Yu Yu Hakusho? Because I even like _stupid_ cool quotes, I'll take that as a stupid question…

**Legal Notice:** No resemblance herewith is intended between any fictitious, original characters and persons living, dead, or wandering the night in ghostly torment, unless, of course, I say so, or if I find the allusion funny. This disclaimer extends to all characters, includes random Star Trek references, and will not be repeated on a regular basis.

**ON WITH THE SHOW!**

**Overture: In the Next Eleven Seconds**

It was the dawn of another day, but he couldn't tell from where he was. Not that it mattered, anyway. Dawn, dusk, mid-noon; all lit by the glow of a thousand detonated flashpoints, all shadowed by the constant haze of dust, smog, and much worse that seeded--nay, infested--the skies and streets of the almost unrecognizable city, in a once proud nation, once part of a once living world. No longer. This was where the current disaster--it was always the _current_ disaster--had begun. And within a few days, even perhaps today, this was where it would end. If the flashpoints, already detonated but still dangerous, didn't kill whatever was left, the inevitable strike forces would, spurred on by the constant climate of mindless fear of that ever-terrifying _other_, and if they didn't, something else would. It no longer mattered how. It was only a matter of when.

The dust choked him as he breathed, a constant burn in his lungs, and he as he stepped toward the window in the vain hope of a cool breeze, a much crueler current blew in, a cloud of radioactive particles that made his skin sting all over, radiation unaffected by the rags that had once been decent, even somewhat nice, clothes. The sullen burn became a sudden fire as he inhaled involuntarily, and he struggled to hide the bout of painful coughs that racked his body.

He was reasonably sure that no one else was around to see his attack of weakness, but these days, he was never sure of anything. One day he'd been sure that the sun would rise tomorrow; he hadn't seen the sun in days. He thought it had been days, but the fluctuation of light and darkness was interrupted by the constant glow of the most radioactive spots. Ground zeroes, all of them.

His lair happened to be right in the center of the first one, the one that had been designed to end it all with one fell swoop. The second wave had been only to cut off any escape routes that might have been prepared or in the process of being opened, not that the passage would lead any fortunate enough to have time and power to complete such a process to a place any better. It would be a textbook case of 'out of the frying pan, into the fire', rephrased perhaps as 'out of the hellhole, straight into Hell'.

At least, he thought it had been. He certainly remembered the sound of the beautiful bay window, looking out over the ocean, smashing into shards. Beyond that, nothing. Before that, little.

The coughs made him inhale still more dust, fueling a vicious circle that led to him gasping fruitlessly for breath. Stumbling away from the shattered window, the remaining formerly crystal clear glass now shattered and sharp, he picked his way through the rubble and into a relatively safe corner, shielded from view on three sides by fallen debris. Curling his knees up to his chest, he expelled one last cloud of black dust and scrubbed at his mouth with one hand, none too clean, in disgust. He struggled to keep his hair, grown shaggily long, out of his mouth—it was just at that length that invited chewing on the ends, voluntarily or otherwise. He couldn't remember the last time things had slowed down enough to have it cut, and now it was matted into filthy black dreadlocks.

The fallen metal felt unusually sharp against his back, so he rose from the chance-made shelter and reached for the weapon he usually carried with him, a beam of metal, relatively thin and the length of his forearm, that he had spent a long period of time obsessively sharpening. The only really sharp edge was the point. The primitive blade was better for hitting things hard with than drawing blood. Evidently, he hadn't paid enough attention to how it was done or he didn't have the right tools. Once (he thought) he hadn't needed a physical weapon and could rely on his power to defend himself from whatever predators, two-legged, four-legged, or with any imaginable number of legs, dared to threaten him.

That power hadn't saved him. It hadn't saved anyone for very long. Oh, he'd managed to buy a few people a few more days, maybe a couple of weeks or as long as a month, but he didn't think it had been to much avail.

Who had they been? Were any of them still alive? Was anyone still alive?

He got his answer almost immediately as he peeked cautiously around the heavy door, now uselessly ajar, and saw a scruffy demon, crouched on all fours, scuffling at the double doors down the hall, which stood cracked apart by about a hand-span, guarding a ten-story drop. Why the creature wanted to go in there, he didn't know at first glance, but as it moved aside to get a better angle on its objective, he saw the better part of a hand and arm, bloated and shredded by death. The sickly sweet odor of rot emanated from it in waves. The demon resumed its attack on the arm, as if trying to drag it out and onto the hallway floor. Whether there was a body attached, he wasn't about to speculate.

Keeping a wary eye on the creature, he headed the other way, where his faulty memory told him there were stairs.

The stairs were there. As a general term, this was accurate; however, the stairs were not _all_ there. Some were outright gone, collapsed, or broken, or scavenged. He was not surprised. His own weapon had been, he recalled dimly, a stair rail at one point in its life.

Traversing the stairs was an adventure all its own, suffused with a constant feeling of balancing on a knife's edge, in the wind, on top of a ten-story building, assuming that said knife was made out of aluminum foil. He did not find this at all odd. It made perfect sense to the current situation.

The ground floor and ground were no better, although they did have the merit of not shaking incessantly, and one's foot almost never punched a hole in an apparently solid surface. It was, however, much more heavily populated.

By an ingenious combination of stealth, observation, intimidation, and not looking edible, he avoided a pack of scrounging survivors, rooting through gutters and smashing anything that resembled a shelter in their search for food and water.

He noticed, with biting irony, that the pack was made up of an eclectic mixture of humans and demons, both races equally grubby and starving, their feet, hands, and bodies caked with the filth of the streets. They reeked almost as strongly as the earth itself, suffused with the awful odors of blood, rotting flesh, decaying trash, unwashed masses, and bodily wastes.

"So this is the price of species unity," he muttered to himself. "We have to be reduced to animals before we find a common bond."

The sound of his own voice startled him. He vaguely remembered the last time he'd spoken, to warn off an intruder whose face he'd never seen. It had fled his lair too quickly for him to get a fix on. Since then, who had there been to talk to, and what had there been to say?

It also reminded him how dry his throat was. His words had emerged as a horrid rasp barely intelligible even to him. But water was dear in this shattered world of broken buildings and the dead who hadn't stopped breathing yet; clean water, far more valuable than gold. Most people lived off chance-caught rain; polluted though it was, it was far better than the vile fluid that seeped from the sewers after they overflowed, which they did from time to time.

Taking the opposite direction, again, from the desperate pack, he journeyed further away from the city in search of water. It was always risky, leaving; the balance of power between one gang and another could change in a heartbeat, and having left a place for fifteen minutes almost guaranteed a change. In the space of a few minutes, wars almost as ferocious as the one that had ruined them all could and did kill dozens, both fighters and bystanders, as aimless rage and mutual desperation turned once civilized people of either race into mindless killers.

Street wars were bad, really bad. Anyone, anything was fair game, and they were started over the most meaningless of provocations. The last time he'd emerged from his lair on the tenth floor, he'd seen a pebble, kicked up by a stray foot, strike a man on the ear. Roaring in excessive rage, he'd leapt to his feet and tried to snap the neck of the woman, no more than a girl, who'd knocked it by accident. Some things, like protecting females, were at the core of both human and demon souls, and the entire street and the inhabitants of several surrounding buildings had been pulled in, wielding fists, rocks, rubble, or the rare honed weapon in futile rage. Despite the alleged protective instinct, women and children alike were struck down, simply because they were in the person's way or a potential threat.

Leaving his lair was an open invitation for someone to come in and steal it, but he rather thought that wouldn't happen. During the days after the bomb wave, he'd established something of a reputation for himself. He was allied with no gang, demonic or human; he offered them no threat; and they left him alone. A peculiar standoff, for one who'd once been at the very head of the teen gangs of the city, but one, he felt, appropriate. He'd grown up a lot since then.

There was no true boundary for the city limits of one of the former greatest cities in the world. He counted himself out of the city proper only when the buildings were reduced to less than three stories on the average. There were, of course, few plants left; what few he could see were dying as they stood. Many did not, lying helter-skelter upon the filthy ground. The parks of the world were dead.

In the suburbs of the city, he listened carefully for any sign of life. He closed his ears to the cry of an unfed child in the distance. It seemed that he had heard that cry a thousand times. There was nothing he, or anyone, could do.

Besides the infant, he heard nothing. It was still peculiar to hear total silence, without the hum of power and activity that he'd taken for granted not too long ago. Although his memories of specific events before the bombs had fallen were hazy, he remembered impressions well. The smell of a fire hotter than anything, the sensation of water engulfing him, the sound of a scream; all these he remembered well, although they had no place in his patchwork mind.

The suburbs were as dry as a bone, and reflexively he looked at the sky in hope of rain, foiled by the constant cover of dust and ash. Looking away in disgust and regret, he shimmied under the remains of an office building, propped at a ridiculous angle by the wreckage that had accumulated under it and the surrounding buildings, not quite as tall but in slightly better structural repair, not that they were by any means intact.

It was the very smell, the very feel of the air that led him to it. The air, so stuffy and compressed beneath the destroyed concrete and metal, even tasted different in the presence of water. With his body blocking the light from the narrow gap, he could not see where it was coming from, but he could follow his instincts, and they led him deeper into the cavern.

Groping in the darkness, his fingers found a pool of liquid. They sank in up to the second knuckle, and he let out a harsh bark of triumph, withdrawing the hand. He promptly stuck it in his mouth to lick off the droplets, loath to waste any. It tasted salty and warm, but he swallowed greedily. With his other hand, he reached for the bottle that he'd tied to the back of his belt, which was actually a length of cord, as an afterthought a few seconds before leaving his lair.

With an exultant chuckle, he carefully lowered the neck of the bottle into the pool, listening with helpless joy to the sound of liquid running into it.

Over his laugh, he heard the sound of slow dripping. Curious, hoping against hope that he'd found a spring or other source, he probed with his feet to either side, trying to get out of the light so that he could see what he'd found.

After a bit of uncomfortable searching, during the course of which the sole of his foot snagged on a sharp edge and ripped a gash, reaching toward his heel, in the makeshift sandal, he found a void to his right and slightly behind him. Taking care not to spill the precious liquid, he inched backwards and maneuvered himself into the small space, lowering his feet carefully until he found a reasonably solid foothold. The light, no longer impeded by his body, flooded in.

He blinked, eyes adjusting to the new illumination, and squinted at the remnants of the puddle.

The first thing he saw was that another drop had just descended, and the ripples were expanding over the surface slowly. The second thing he noticed was that the pool was a dark reddish-brown, and there was a stained trail down the wall.

He moved his eyes upward, seeking the source, and found it. His heart almost stopped with horror and revulsion.

A familiar face, long since dead, dead elsewhere and buried far from home, met his eyes, formerly verdant eyes now lifeless, clouded, and staring. Some fluid dripped grimly from the three-inch gash in his deceased friend's wrist, more from the knife he'd embedded to the simple hilt in his own heart. The trail down the wall was that of dried blood.

His scream was completely involuntary and cut off abruptly as his stomach caught up with his mind and tried to eject by force the liquid he'd just so covetously swallowed. Trying desperately to convince his body that he was hallucinating, he retched, body rejecting the idea but retaining the fluids he so urgently needed. He gagged, looking away compulsively as the smell of fresh death that he'd smelled at that time caught up with him to plague him again.

"You're dead," he whispered, although it hurt him to say it. "You were never here, oh, god, I'm seeing things, no…"

Refusing to look back at the cinderblock with its morbid burden, he backed furiously out of the narrow tunnel, clinging to the hard-won bottle despite the fact that it might be full of blood. Although some of the liquid within slopped over the sides due to his haste, he dared not stop to lick the precious drops off. His elbows collided with the walls, scraping them bloody and raw, but he did not notice or care as he fled the scene.

Shivering helplessly as his feet hit solid earth again, he slumped to the floor and placed his head between his knees, feeling as if he were about to lose everything he'd eaten in the last few days, which admittedly wasn't much.

When he recovered, he looked up, loosening his death grip on the bottle he still held and checking it with trepidation.

It was three-quarters' full of slightly dirty water.

After a moment's relieved silence, he took a deep breath and released it in the form of words.

"I'm going mad," Yusuke said quite calmly, and then repeated, "I'm going mad."

With this fact solidly established, he felt a little better. After all, he'd remembered the name—his name—he'd nearly forgotten. And with that core identity firmly in place, jolted there by the shock of his past coming back to haunt him, more memories returned, and almost all of them were bad.

_A woman leans against an RV, covered in reddish dust, scowling defensively with her arms crossed over her chest_

_Why are you telling me these stories when there are real discoveries to be made here?_

With each impression, a little more of the past returned to him.

_Don't lie. What's really going on?_

_That's salt water. It's wet._

As much as he would not have liked to remember…

_If you think for one moment that I will have any part of this, then you are a bigger fool than I thought_!

_A blaze the like of which he's never imagined erupts before him, drying his skin and causing it to stretch over his skull_

_Goodbye, then…_

Faces and voices of all stripes…

_The shouts of a thousand people, all voices blurring into one, filled with mutual hatred_

_Hope glowing in a man's eyes as he listened_

The sounds and smells—God, the smells—of too many fearful bodies crowded into one space in the hope of escaping the terror that ran the streets—

_One shot_

_Damn you! Damn you! and thrice damn you!_

_One more_

The sound of the world shattering once and for all.

He looked up at the dust-filled sky, and tried to think of something deep to say. What came out was, "This sucks." Not very meaningful, certainly no famous last words, although with the number of deaths in the last few months, it would not be surprising if those very two words had been the final sentiments of other people.

Although he felt, for a moment, like crying, he could not afford to waste the precious water, and time was pressing. Every minute he spent not defending what little he had was another minute in which to lose everything. Many would consider his scant possessions not worth the fight, but for Yusuke Urameshi in the Days After the War, something had to be worth the fight.

Man must have something to live for, or else he would die.

Favoring his scratched right foot, he turned his back on the fallen skyscraper and limped back towards his lair through the smaller buildings that huddled around the tower like mice around a fallen giant. He didn't look back. There was nothing to see.

As he retraced his steps, taking sparse sips from his water bottle, the newly awakened memories sparking through his mind awoke more, continuing the chain reaction, and from time to time, he stumbled as he walked, with emotion and regret overcoming him.

"I wonder who is left," he murmured to himself, more to hear himself speak and recall the sound of his own voice than to vocalize any useful information. "Probably no one…how did I end up the last of us still alive?"

Just at the corner of his eye, forms all too familiar flickered. Though he could not see them clearly, he knew they were staring at him, accusing him without words.

"It's not my fault," he told them. "I tried my best."

He was not particularly surprised that they did not reply, nor that they continued to follow him. "Go away," he told them. "You're all dead."

Female faces, dearer to him than his own soul, flickered in front of him, weeping and pointing at him in fury. Out of long-learned habit, he recoiled. "Stop it!" They lowered their hands and gave him mournful stares.

"There was nothing I could do!"

They, too, did nothing.

"It's not my _fault!_" he howled, flinging the glass bottle at them. It revolved through the air, spraying brackish water, and shattered against a brick wall. Shards of none-too-clean glass peppered his face and torso.

It was the sound of the breaking glass that brought him back to his senses. He could have sworn it was the same sound he'd thought he'd heard god knows how many days ago, as a door had slammed with final fury and the greatest peace conference the world had ever known turned into the greatest massacre of leaders in history. It was the sound of every hope, every dream, dying with the world.

Covering his eyes and face against the shards, he screwed his eyelids as shut tight as he could and fought to envision an empty street free of reproachful ghosts.

"Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five four three two one," he chanted like a little child, and only then did he dare to open one eye.

The street was empty of all but a corpse, covered in scruffy fabric that might well have been the underside of a couch in a former life. However, the corpse was no one he knew, as evidenced by a quick check by a justly-paranoid Yusuke, so he went on, nudging the broken bottle regretfully with his left foot as he passed it.

After a few paces, he turned back and picked up the two largest pieces, handling them carefully so as to not cut his fingers on the newly-broken edges. Tearing two strips from the makeshift shroud, he wrapped the rough fabric around the thicker ends, creating two rudimentary daggers, before continuing on his way.

Heartless? Perhaps; but in the Days After the War, it was everyone for him- or herself, and death take the hindmost. There was, truly, no alternative for those who wished to live.

Any stragglers from the roving packs that had been sweeping the street when he left had vanished to parts unknown by the time he got back. The only inhabitants of the street were spiders and—wouldn't you know it?—cockroaches, which scuttled in and around the garbage choking the streets.

And for good reason. No sooner had he emerged into the street proper than a trio of figures, one large and bulky, one skinny and tall, the third the scrawniest boy he'd ever seen, surrounded him, body language clearly telegraphing that they weren't there for a civil conversation.

One hand conspicuously drawing his makeshift blade, Yusuke met their eyes each in turn to let them know that they were dealing with a formidable foe. He recognized none of them, although the beanpole looked vaguely familiar. However, he neither could nor needed to place a name to any of them.

"All right, guys, back off," he said firmly, letting no trace of fear show in his voice or manner. This was an easy task, for he wasn't really afraid of them, now that he could remember taking down beings that made the biggest look like a rather underfed mouse.

"Hand over the knives," the skinny one whined, an accent unmistakable in his voice identifying him as a former resident of the demon plane. "Then get out of here."

Yusuke squinted up at him. "Why should I?"

It was a good thing he was on guard, for a sixth sense rather than any actual indication cued him into the attack from behind. Spinning on one foot, shoving the other behind him to brace himself, he caught the little swordsman's attack on the flat, blunt edge of his blade, flipping him over his head and into the midst of his buddies. His joints ached with the effort.

_Thank god for training sessions,_ Yusuke huffed to himself. _That little punk could have—_

His train of thought cut off abruptly, for the man—no, boy—who'd attacked him suddenly looked a lot more familiar than before. He froze in shock: a distinct disadvantage in the skirmish that had just erupted around him. Apparently the other two had taken his lofting their gang mate through the air and straight into the bulky one's stomach the wrong way. He'd learned that trick at the hands of someone who was a lot better at it, but his own accuracy surprised him.

_Hallucination!_ he denied as he mechanically batted aside thugs, making all the while for the building in which he currently resided, cursing all the while at the pain in his joints that was making thrashing the desperate lowlifes a bigger pain that it really should have been. _Impossible! Trick of the light, faulty memory…anything!_

The boy he'd sent flying through the air circled around his bigger mates, hissing through his teeth and looking for an opening to try another sneak attack through. His impossible resemblance to the man who'd taught Yusuke the same trick he'd just used so successfully (proof positive it wasn't him) was unnerving Yusuke, seeing as he knew the man was dead, but he couldn't take part of his vision off him lest the kid try to stab him in the back again. Pure luck had saved him the first time, and his current track record with luck wasn't good enough to let him trust the Fates, who were as probably as dead as the rest of the world, for anything.

Gaining the far side of the little pack, Yusuke pulled one of his new knives out of his belt and sent the freshly-broken glass spinning in their direction, aiming for the biggest one because he was the easiest target. He was a horrible shot, the blade wobbling crazily as it flew, but the trio didn't know that, and they shifted their attention to dodge it.

Yusuke took advantage of their momentary distraction to make a break for the half-open doors. Better the stairs, death trap though they were, than chance his luck with a street brawl for any longer.

He didn't have any time to close the double doors behind him, especially as the double doors had been fried in the middle of an automatic cycle and were wedged half open (or half closed). There hadn't been any guarantee that they'd be able to be pulled open again if he tried to shut them, and he'd had neither strength nor motivation to do so. There would be no point in cutting off a perfectly good escape route.

The trio's bellows of rage as the glass projectile smashed at their feet followed him into the trashed lobby. Dodging rubble and debris, he made for the stairs, hurling imaginative invective at the designer who'd decided that a freestanding spiral sculpture would be just the right centerpiece for the lobby. It was cold comfort that his peculiar masterpiece was now lying in ruins on the carpet, once beautifully patterned and textured, now mucky beyond the nightmares of interior decorators.

Ballroom staircase filling the entire fourth wall, a whole two stories of the embassy by itself? Sure, why not? And while they were at it, why don't they cut corners and make it a hollow staircase, so that when an MAM-18 special assignment missile blasted through the conference room window, most of the stair treads would fall through?

Such was the staircase Yusuke made tracks up at three times the speed which he'd come down. Behind him came three furious thugs, who barely even paused to double-take at the slope ahead.

"Aw, come on!" Yusuke groaned to himself as he looked back, temporarily on a sturdy spot, and saw them heading after him. "There's got to be easier marks somewhere around here, why me?"

He took another step and promptly put his foot through a brand-new hole. "Oh, yeah, that's why," he muttered. "The Fates hate me."

Pulling his foot from the hole, he continued upward, taking no little pleasure from the fact that the trio seemed to have even less luck with the stairway than he did. The largest one had been forced to stand at the bottom, and was collecting shards of the shattered statue to use as missiles. Yusuke ducked as one zipped by, a hair too close to his face for comfort. Several more followed, and the man's aim was improving with every shot.

He reached the second landing with a growl and turned around, fed up with the whole situation. Scanning the area below, he took in the layout: the big human at the bottom, forced to hold his fire for fear of hitting his comrades; the skinny demon, clinging to the steps with both hands and toes; the little boy, presumably human, still bearing that eerie resemblance, and, being lighter, making far quicker headway up the flight of steps than Yusuke had hoped.

"All right, this has ceased to be funny," Yusuke muttered, rubbing his shoulder where a marble missile had exacerbated the constant pain in his joints. "Time for some retaliation." His eyes fell on the kid. "And you, my little backstabbing friend, are first."

Taking the second glass knife from his belt, he fingered the cloth-wrapped hilt tentatively. He'd only have one shot, and he was walking a fine line between killing the kid and missing him completely. He only wanted to scare him off.

Narrowing his eyes and taking a deep breath, simultaneously praying for a lack of black dust and spitting greasy, dirty locks out of his mouth, he pinched the blade between his thumb and index finger and sighted along the line he wanted to throw.

The more he looked at the savage child, the more the resemblance to his dead friend increased, not physically as much, but something indefinable, and, rather than encouraging his sympathy, this only incited his anger more and more.

_Focus!_ a voice he couldn't spare the brain cells to identify right now whispered in his mind's ear, and he obeyed reflexively.

A far cry from his previous clumsy cast, this knife flew straight and true, scything past the child, who was in the lead, and scored a glowing line through his thigh before continuing on to strike the skinny demon in the shoulder, leaving a bright blue-white light in its wake.

Shrieking in sudden fear, the two climbers remembered that discretion was the better part of valor, and made sudden haste for the stable floor and outside, taking their bulky human buddy with them.

Above, Yusuke stared in surprise at the dagger, which the demon had pulled from his shoulder only to cast away in agony as the light infusing the glass made its reappearance, dropping it with a shriek. It lay on the first landing, still sparking, even throwing out the odd bolt of energy every few seconds. As he watched in amazement, it faded and died, and only a lump of glass, tip painted red and purple with human blood and demonic ichor, remained.

"Whoa," Yusuke said finally. It did not truly express his amazement, but he was only rediscovering most of his vocabulary today. "That was me." The moment he said it, it felt right.

"I did that! _I_ did _that!_" Grinning with sudden pride, he even laughed. "Right! I can do that!" Struck by a sudden, strong memory, he regarded his right hand with triumph. "Bang!" he cried happily, forming the shape of a gun with his thumb and forefinger in the fashion of any child at play.

Dismissing specters, doppelgangers, and the horrors of the day so far in favor of his newly reawakened power, which was sending a slow buzz through all his limbs, relieving some of the pain, he continued upstairs with a chuckle and fewer adventures with the staircase, leaving the glass knife to lie.

His good humor lasted all the way to the door of his lair, when the downside of regaining his memories struck him again in the form of all the bodies in the room.

The smile fell from his face like a rock.

There were no words, and he didn't try. Bundles that he'd stepped over and stumbled around while his mind had still been blurred by shock and the radiation that suffused the city now appeared more clearly to his eyes, his brain finally acknowledging their true identity while simultaneously trying to reject the death scattered around the chamber.

Now he recognized the mangled conference table, as covered in black dust, cracks, and embedded metal, glass, and stone as the rest of the room. His makeshift shelter of fallen metal resolved itself into a conglomeration of roof beams, chairs, the remains of recording equipment, and window struts. Even the walls and ceiling sagged, not only from lack of support but from the blast. The bodies on the floor had faces; names, most of which he vaguely remembered; and histories, some of which he could recall. When compared to his memories of how this room had looked before, it was enough to instill the hopelessness of the future, if it ever came, permanently.

Although humans had outnumbered demons and spirits two to one, there was still only a limited handful of either. At a loss for any better gesture, Yusuke clasped his fists, crossed at the wrists, to his solar plexus in a distinctly demonic gesture and bowed to the room of corpses at large, as if to appease the restless souls of the so violently departed.

The shrapnel had devastated many of them beyond hope of recognition, and the initial radiation shock from the MAM-18 missile had further warped bodies and even the structure of the room. Ripples like those seen in the finest steel of sword blades were mirrored in the walls, with the wooden veneer having been burned away in a heartbeat and the metal beyond affected out of proportion. The ceiling bellied downward in the center, ashes dusting it in a heavy layer which lessened, if only slightly, as the soot got further away from the center of the room.

That table, a work of art all on its own, had been of great symbolic significance, and now it was only a wreck. Even though, next to the loss of life and the destruction of their last hope for peaceful coexistence, the destruction of the conference table was negligible, it was this that Yusuke focused on, it and the delta-shaped missile embedded in its center, directly below the thickest concentration of particles. Had the designers of the MAM-18 known how ironic that particular configuration was?

For if he allowed his mind and eyes to drift from the table, he would have to think about the recently-deceased delegates to the chamber, and it was not long before he had absorbed everything he cared to see about the counter, and several things he didn't, and his eyes were drawn helplessly elsewhere.

He could still recognize, from their positions or the dress or physical attributes that remained, who they had been. Delegates from the Western world shared death with those from the far South; diplomats from Central Europe and the Middle East joined demons from the greatest kingdoms of the Makai. Even the governor of the fledgling colony of the Moon had made the journey from Tranquility City, only to be slaughtered with the rest. The leaders of the remaining peoples of Earth and the Planes had come together to create a peace, and had instead set themselves up as the perfect target.

Not only the ambassadors had been present, as was custom for any great global, and now pan-dimensional, affair. An assorted crew of reporters had been thick on the ground, now quite literally, as well as the requisite governmental bodyguards, whose appointed job had, of course, to protect their leader. It had all been to no avail, for the threat had not come from within, but from without, and all their security precautions had been bypassed, not by one man, but by many.

Perhaps the treaty had been emotionally premature. But had it not taken place when it had, however abortive, there would have been no civilizations of any stripe left to treat with.

That had been how Yusuke had been a part of this. Not as a delegate, for as much as he'd matured, no one would have been quite as free-thinking as to put him in front of a ground-breaking precedent-setting peace conference, but as one of two guards. A token gesture, they'd thought. After all, a peace treaty is supposed to be just that.

The other guard was dead. And it was _that_ which Yusuke didn't want to even see, for it would mean admitting that he was the last of his gang left.

But to deny it and try to forget would be to dishonor the dead, and having been dead before, Yusuke had no desire to do such a thing.

Steeling himself, he sank to his knees, then to a more comfortable sitting position. The buzz in his nerves from his newly-reawakened power fizzled and died, as if in shame.

"I don't know if I should thank you," he said finally. His words fell, most accurately, on dead air. "You should have saved yourself."

The silence grated on him, and he hugged his knees to his chest, shivering. "Goddammit," he swore, to nothing, to no one, to no earthly use.

There was nothing else left to say.

There was nothing left to do.

He could die now.

But he couldn't even do that, could he? Not when his closest friend—however often they'd both fervently denied it—had sacrificed himself so that he could live.

"Look, it's all over. We're all dead." He knew he was now quite mad, talking to a corpse, but the fact that he could acknowledge that gave him some reassurance. "What am I supposed to do now?" he asked, less a question than a protest.

The dead did not reply, and they sat in silence for a long time.

It is possible that Yusuke would have sat there forever, life and hope and drive all draining from him until death took him too, were it not for interference, and not in the form of rescue, for there was no one to rescue, and no one to do the rescuing.

A growl in the air finally got his attention, and he looked up, tearing his eyes away from the floor as some light returned to slowly dulling eyes.

Rising stiffly, he left his friend's corpse behind and stumbled over to the pulverized window, skirting carcasses left and right. He was sure it must smell, but his senses were giving out, exhausted, one by one.

So it came as a shock as with heart-stopping vividness, he looked out over a restless and polluted ocean under a choked and lifeless sky and saw, in the distance but getting closer by the second, three dots that were clearly manmade, and just as clearly hostile.

Yusuke knew what they were. He also knew that the second wave was about to fall, and there was no one to save his ultimately useless life for a second time.

Surprisingly enough, all he could think was, "About time."

In the next eleven seconds, the sky will fall, the war will end, and all will come to nothing.

Eleven seconds to regret.

Ten seconds to hate.

Nine seconds to forgive.

Eight seconds to remember.

Seven.

Six.

Five.

Four.

_To Be Continued._


	2. 1'1: A Tale of Three Worlds

**First Movement:**

**Country of the Blind**

"_The only spirit world I know about for sure is the Agency Liquor Store about a mile down the road." (—from Stephen King's _The Dark Half

**Acknowledgements:** Many, many thanks to **grayangle**, without whom either none of this would exist, or it would not be the shape it is today. (Now, if you don't like it, blame me, not him.) To **grayangle**: I hope you like how it turns out! Advice is welcome. Yes, in fact, I do realize I have been talking about this story for over a year now. Bet you thought I wasn't going to do it. But here it is. Please enjoy, and I hope I will be able to do this story proud.

**ON WITH THE SHOW!**

**Chapter One: A Tale of Three Worlds**

* * *

This is not a happy story, and it doesn't end well. Those seeking happiness have not found what they seek. Those looking for triumph may make their own judgment.

If you've come here to see your favorite characters fall in love with characters that I invent, or with a different favorite character, you need to turn around. But this is a story about love. And it's a story about hate. It's a story about murder, and about revenge.

This is a story about the status quo. And it's about unbalancing it. And rebalancing it. It's a story about you. And it's a story about me. Though neither of us will appear in these pages, it's about us. And you know it, or you wouldn't care enough to read it.

If you've come here to see good triumph over evil, you're in the wrong place. This is not a story in which, evil defeated, everyone goes home again. This is not a story about evil. It's a story about life. And about death.

Assuming that you're looking for people you know, people you may count as friends, know this: without them, things would have been different. Whether it would have ended better, or not, who am I to say? This is their story, but not only their story.

There are a lot of stories told about these people, and not all of them are very complimentary. Unfortunately, these are the ones most likely to be true. Because this is not a story of perfect heroes. It has never been a story about heroes.

This is a story about winning. And about losing everything, regardless. This is a story about cheating, and still being beaten.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present for your inspection _Uneven Odds._

This is not a happy story. But if you want to hear it, it's the story I have to tell.

* * *

**_Several Years Earlier…_**

Stephanie Erinyes stepped hard on the brake of her Toyota and seriously considered turning around. The only thing stopping her was the prospect of _another_ eight-hour drive, eight hours of next to nothing, in a bad mood and with no chance at some time to recharge. Leaning against her steering wheel, she turned her face into the air conditioning, which was sending arctic air in her direction at full blast, blowing dark hair from her face and across her sunglasses. After similar landscape in all directions, what had she expected?

It had been foolish to assume that once she'd successfully traversed the distance between the off-ramp and the current residence of her old college classmate Sato, there would be some relief from the endless monotony of what might be accurately termed 'desert'. Previously, the term had brought to mind blowing sand dunes, camels, and cacti, having not ever visited a desert or having opted to do any research once she'd successfully moved beyond the days of elementary-school dioramas. Only one of the above had she actually seen during her drive, accompanied only by a book on tape, the twist of which she'd seen coming an hour back, and a set of instrumental music discs, punctuated from time to time by various radio stations as she passed into and out of their reception, and if she ever saw another cactus, she'd have to scream…

Logically, she decided to take that last statement back, or else she would be reduced to gibbering the moment she looked up.

Reluctantly putting the car back in gear, she cruised along the graveled road, just above the speed at which she would have coasted to a stop through sheer lack of momentum. She'd walked over backwoods trails better paved, and after a grueling drive, racing the sun in the hopes of not having to drive through strange country by dark, she was stiff, sore in some most unflattering places, and becoming less and less tolerant with every bump in the road, feeling, it seemed, each and every rock in her back and thighs.

Again, Stephanie wondered why she hadn't just flown to the nearest airport and rented a car there. It seemed the sensible thing to do. However, flying would have involved not only paying the extra money, but going through endless security procedures at the on-ramp. Had she been traveling light, this would not have been an extra problem, but, in his first excited phone call to her, Sato had insisted that she bring every journalistic tool she owned, which would have been hell's own problem to get through customs. She didn't feel like taking apart her cameras and electronic notepad to prove she wasn't hiding drugs or explosives, even if the metal detectors and scanners didn't wipe every byte of memory on them.

When she called him back, surprised and wary at the reappearance of a voice she hadn't heard in six years, she had demanded an explanation.

One hadn't been readily forthcoming.

"Look, unless you can give me an unequivocal reason to haul my butt across the country, away from a very important commission, Sato, get off the goddamned line!" she had finally shouted, head throbbing from a day of trying to put her client's scientific explanations into a format she and her readers could understand readily.

She couldn't see him over the telephone connection, but if he hadn't changed in six years, she would bet he'd be wringing his hands nervously, looking for something to hang on to. Much to her surprise, his voice had come back firm and clear.

"Stephanie, it's very difficult to explain. You're much better at words than I am—that's why I need _you_ to come cover this discovery. It's the story of a lifetime!"

Gritting her teeth and fighting the urge to throw the phone back at the set whether or not it had any chance of landing properly, Stephanie forced out a strangled question, "I have the story of a lifetime! Do you have any idea how busy I am? I have _daily_ interviews with Dominic Massey scheduled for the next two and a half weeks, and I can not afford to miss the deadline!"

Static crackled over the line for a few seconds. Then, sounding vaguely outraged, Sato replied, "This is far more important than Massey's theory work, Steph."

That did it. "Oh, you're telling me that you've figured out something more important than a lifelong physicist in line for the Nobel? Like heck! I'm busy, Sato!" And just before hanging up with furious force, she shouted, "And don't call me _Steph!_" The yell didn't help her headache much.

He'd called back the next day, catching her just as she was running out the door, with similar results.

Reluctantly, laughing at herself for even considering it, she'd picked up the handset when she got back to her apartment that night. Checking the phone's memory for the most recent number that had called it, she screened out a check-in from her manager and a telephone solicitor looking to sell her hair restoration without chemicals, she finally located the exchange Sato must have been using. Cursing the inevitable charges that would result in calling to—where was that from anyway—she pressed redial and waited.

"Russ, the brush is under the table, I told you," he said the instant he picked up the phone.

_Who?_ "Sato, it's Stephanie Erinyes," she told him acridly.

"Stephanie!" he cried happily, changing demeanor in the blink of an eye. "Sorry about that; one of my people can't find anything today." He paused. "Hold on…what?" She couldn't hear anything, but apparently he could. "Yeah, I'll try; I'll try…still there?"

"I'm strongly considering not being—what did you want before I hung up on you yesterday?"

Annoyed now, he replied, "Oh, now you want to know?"

She glared at her reflection in the mirror mounted over the gas fireplace. "It is polite to apologize. I apologize. But I am very busy, and I've been extremely lucky to get an assignment covering Massey's work. His theories are so impressive." This last was quite an understatement; Dominic Massey was well on his way to redefining conventional cosmic structure.

Sato sighed. "I didn't mean to offend you, Steph—sorry, Stephanie. I didn't realize how much you admired the man. You know, I meant to congratulate you on your assignment."

She didn't quite believe him, but it was nice of him to say so. "Well, that's something, at least." An awkward silence hung between them. "So…how have you been?" she finally asked.

"Busy too," he replied. "I've got a team out in Arizona, and we've made some unusual discoveries…"

She sensed bait. "You want me to cover some dusty dig in the middle of nowhere?" she demanded from her fourth-floor downtown apartment.

Sato sounded deadly earnest. "Stephanie, there are secrets out here no one's ever found before. When this hits press, it's going to change everything. You're my friend…at least, I hope you still are. I'd like you to be in on this. Would you like to be the woman who tells the world something that will change science as we know it?"

For the lead writer of one of the most prestigious science magazines in the world, it was a tempting offer. But, ever practical, Stephanie was forced to decline. "Sorry, 'Yashi," she replied, reverting to the intimate nickname he'd preferred. "I just can't."

"We'll reimburse you," he pleaded, sounding desperate. "You'll be famous!"

"Why me, 'Yashi?" she finally demanded after a few more minutes of back-and-forth. "Why me so specifically?"

For a long moment, she was concerned that the connection had failed. But seconds before she was going to hang up to harangue her cable company, he replied meekly, "Because you know I'm not crazy, and wouldn't lie or forge something like this."

Now that was bait.

_But I'm starting to seriously reconsider the crazy part,_ Stephanie griped to herself as a large rock sent a jolt of pain through her sore buttocks. The only upside was that soon she'd be too stiff to feel anything. Reflexively, she shot a glance into the backseat to make sure her equipment was still secure. It seemed all right; the straps holding tripods together had not disengaged, and the padded briefcase holding her pet laptop sat cushioned by a bag of clothes and toiletries, which reminded her that she wanted a shower, or, even better, a hot bath. Soon.

Flipping down the shade flap over the driver's seat, she squinted into the lowering sun, trying in vain to see the encampment that 'Yashi had given her precise directions to. She'd followed them to the letter. So where was everyone? By all indications, she should have reached the rendezvous by now.

Turning into the shade afforded by the mountain range she'd been flanking for some time, her gaze finally fell upon a tiny structure, barely more than a roof over a couple slabs of rough concrete, huddling under the heavily-grassed mountain like a stone chick under a far more imposing mother cliff.

_If this is where he expects me to work out of, I'll have his hide as a rug!_ she swore, wishing she'd at least brought a potato peeler, or some equivalent. Rattling over the last few meters of grass, stone, and unfortunate other plants, including a misplaced baby prickly pear, she no longer bothered to cut back her curses before they escaped her teeth.

So turning the air blue, she pulled to a stop alongside the small building, sending glares that could fry eggs toward it in the hope that 'Yashi himself would be awaiting her there to no avail.

Instead, the only movement beyond the dust, which refused to settle thanks to a roguish wind that seemed to come from no direction and every direction, was a young man with a magazine, which he appeared to be hastily folding up and tossing into a satchel at his feet. Resisting the urge to roll down the window for fear of what would come all too audibly out of her mouth and all too dustily blow into it, Stephanie watching in a mixture of infuriated disbelief and cynical amusement as the man edged over to the car, which had once been a pristine olive-green but was now the nameless color of desert dust.

_It won't bite you,_ she thought acidly, _but I might_.

Finally working up his courage, he knocked gingerly on the passenger window. Because she wasn't very happy, Stephanie pulled a dumb look in his direction and cupped her hand around the closer ear as if deaf.

Blinking in surprise, he worked out that he was being teased and rapped harder on the window.

Stephanie took pity on him and rolled down the window, leaving the AC on full blast.

"Miss Erinyes?" he asked with a tentative smile.

She bit back the urge to make a sarcastic remark and nodded.

The redhead broke into a grin and reached a hand through the window for her to shake. "I'm Carl Kildare, miss. 'Yashi sent me to escort you the rest of the way."

For a moment she wanted nothing more than to roll up the window, hopefully cutting off his arm at the elbow, and head at the greatest speed her car could manage back home, speed cops be damned. Instead, she mustered up the rest of her temper and shook Kildare's hand. "Good afternoon." With that out of the way, she demanded, "What do you mean, the rest of the way? I thought the site was here."

His smile was just this side of patronizing, and it shredded the last of her nerves. At the last second, she reserved her ire for 'Yashi. "No, miss, but your car probably can't handle the rest of the way. We're further up in the mountains. How much equipment did you bring?"

Dazed, she jerked a thumb in the general direction of the backseat.

Kildare appraised it with a calculating eye. "Yeah, we can fit that much in the Jeep, no problem. Your car can go around back with everyone else's."

Before she could even get in a protest, he gestured. "Follow me."

So she had no choice but to roll up the window, put the Toyota back in gear, and roll at a dreadfully slow pace in the wake of one of 'Yashi's students to a parking lot full almost to the brim with cars of all stripes. Following his wave, she pulled in numbly next to a nice black Subaru and a totally unidentifiable something, nose to nose with an ugly red van.

Wishing more than ever she'd disconnected the phone, Stephanie unlocked the driver's door and gasped with agony as her feet hit the pavement. Not only was the blacktop hotter than hell, burning through the light sandals she'd worn to drive, her legs and upper thighs were killing her!

"Miss Erinyes? Are you all right?" It was Red again, trotting round the back of her car solicitously.

She waved him off impatiently, sat back down on the seat, and massaged her legs by herself.

"Hot," she said incoherently.

He looked down at the blacktop as if this thought had just occurred to him, and the journalist noticed that he was wearing boots. "Sorry, I should have warned you."

"No, I should have thought. Um, where exactly are you taking me in this…did you say Jeep?"

Red pointed, directing her gaze about halfway up one of the mountains. "We're just around from right about there."

"That's specific."

"Sorry, miss. Shall I bring the Jeep round so you don't have to spend too long on the blacktop?"

She gave him a squinted, wary look. "You're being suspiciously nice, Carl Kildare: you neither know me nor have gotten a very polite reception from me. What's the catch?"

He spread his hands as though it were obvious. "Miss Erinyes, you're going to make us famous."

"Hmph. That remains to be seen," she grumbled, but he was already away, presumably to tend to the aforementioned Jeep.

Indeed, not a minute later, the rumble and assorted other noises of a four-wheel drive, heavily used vehicle started up, and the Jeep itself, offensively red, came to a halt just next to the left backseat door.

"All right, miss, what needs moving and how do I do it?"

As eager as he was, she was wary of entrusting her fragile, expensive equipment to this relative stranger. "I'll do it," she warned him off, testing the blacktop with a tentative toe. Perhaps it was the shade cast by her car, but it seemed manageably cooler. Carefully placing both feet on it, she opened the rear door and started transferring camera, laptop, miscellaneous tools, and her two bags of essentials to the cargo hold of the Jeep, using the clothes to cushion some of the more fragile items. Partaking of some of Kildare's willing help, she got everything squared away to her satisfaction.

Reluctantly locking the car, she was semi-seriously considering making a run for it until a spasm from sitting down for eight hours (and counting) reminded her how much she wanted a bath and a nap, neither of which were nearby.

"All right, I'm ready," she grunted, pulling herself into the passenger seat and automatically strapping in, a habit long since ingrained. "And Kildare?"

She leaned back and closed her eyes. "Don't talk to me."

* * *

Stephanie spent almost thirty minutes surreptitiously admiring the landscape from behind half-lowered eyelids; with the need to actually actively concentrate on where she was going removed, she was satisfied to lounge passively while riding shotgun up a mountain. A city girl for most of her life, she was reluctantly impressed by the panoply of colors festooning the sky as the sun edged towards setting, and just managed to keep from pointing in delight when she noticed that the sky had taken on all the colors of the spectrum, from red on the horizon to purple-black further to the east. Although the rock face blocked out the full view, it still made for quite a view. If she didn't despise tourist shots so much, she would have wished to have her camera to hand.

Blessedly, Carl Kildare took her words to heart and didn't say a word to her until they finally leveled out, approaching seemingly the end of the line. However, he did shoot a careful glance in her direction, and, speed-dialing a number on a tiny cell phone which he pulled from a pocket, started a quiet conversation with parties unknown.

"Miss?" he asked, tentatively hovering his fingers above her left arm as if wondering whether she was asleep, dead, or faking either. "We're here."

She abandoned her charade, sitting up and brushing his hand away. The redhead snatched it back as if burned.

Rubbing her eyes to keep herself awake, she took in her surroundings. Surprisingly, they had come to a halt near what looked like any tourist resort in the national park of your choice, only without the 'you are here' signs, litter, and lost newlyweds. The only other person in sight was just coming out of a door on the far side of the compound.

This person, dark blond and sloppily sun-browned, came abreast of her just as she touched down and turned to grab her laptop before anyone else could.

"Stephanie, you made it!" 'Yashi said, obviously pleased. Giving her a warm smile, he opened his arms for a hug at the exact same moment she reached her hand out for a handshake.

The awkward moment was put off as he hurriedly dropped his arms, but kept up the affection by grasping her hand in his two callused ones. From the feel, there was still dust on them both.

"Have a good trip?" he asked, smiling down at her. Although not extremely tall or bulky, there was an air to Kobayashi-maru Sato that made people feel short, but in a good way. No matter their height, most people felt that they were literally under his wing. People liked being around him. When he gave orders, people followed them, and jumped to because they wanted to.

And this man had nothing better to do than dig around in the dirt.

That was her bad mood talking. She knew that, but it continued to. Unfortunately, it did so out loud.

"Please, 'Yashi, spare me the small talk," she groaned.

"Oh, sorry." He seemed to have overlooked her tired mien and less-than-happy demeanor. "Why don't I just show you to your rooms?"

Rooms in the plural sense sounded pretty good. "Do they have a bath attached?"

He chuckled, wrapping one arm around her shoulders. She didn't have the energy to shrug him off as he led her away. "Yes, yes, old friend. I'm not going to scrub your back though."

It probably shouldn't have come out exactly as it did, but she opened her mouth, and "Thank heaven," fell out, making 'Yashi laugh good-naturedly.

"What time do you think would have the best lighting for photographs tomorrow?" he asked as they climbed a staircase.

She couldn't think, but the mention of photographs rang a bell. "My stuff…" she trailed off in a yawn.

"I'll ask Persis or Allie bring them into your room, whichever I see first, so don't lock the outer door," he assured her. "If they put them on the bed, will you be able to stow them properly?"

"Yeah, I'll manage," she mumbled as they reached a door which swung open at his touch. Presenting her with a key in the fashion of motels, he took a good look at her and placed it deftly in her pocket without touching her once.

"Go bathe, Stephanie," he said fondly. "And do try not to fall asleep and drown, all right?"

Despite his caution, she had to be woken up by a pale woman in khaki pants, with hair as dark as her own, who made her escape as soon as Stephanie had dragged herself out of the bath, groping desperately for a towel. By then the water had gone cold anyway.

* * *

Washed, rested, and properly groomed the next morning, Stephanie ventured into the hallways with a better outlook on life. This was bolstered by the fact that it took her only a few minutes to find breakfast, thanks more to her unexpected help than the fact that it was 11:15 AM according to the clock on the bedside table. She had forgotten to reset her watch, so she spent a few seconds doing that before leaving the room. No sense being an hour wrong from everyone else.

Slinging her favorite portable camera around her neck and tucking a notebook under her arm, she slipped several pens into the camera case in preparation against ink shortage, and slid the door open, setting out into the tiled corridor on newly booted feet.

"You look better," a frank female voice informed her as she took her second wrong turn. The source of the voice was immediately apparent. Emerging from a doorway with an incomprehensible symbol marked on it in black paint, the woman from last night, dull jet hair drawn back into a low ponytail, tucked a pencil into the clipboard she held, tilted so that there was no chance of Stephanie seeing its contents by accident.

"Thanks," the latter replied, searching her fuzzy memories for a match, and finding a good guess. "I suppose I should thank you for saving me from a watery death last night, too?"

The woman with the clipboard brushed off the implicit sarcasm. "We've all done it. Looking for breakfast? Or rather lunch?"

Stephanie couldn't tell whether her new acquaintance resented her territory being poached on or was trying to be nice and just failing dismally at it. "If you could just point me in the right direction, then that would be great."

"I'll come with you, if you don't mind. 'Yashi speaks well of you, but I'd like to get my own impression."

"Oh, please tell me he hasn't been broadcasting my every feature from the roof with a megaphone," Stephanie pleaded helplessly.

"Not quite," the woman remarked dryly. "But only just. I'm Persis Iolani, by the way." Juggling clipboard, and pencil, and papers, and all, she extended her hand. As she grasped it, Stephanie noticed a wide gold band on her ring finger. "Engaged?"

If Persis thought this rude, she didn't show it. In fact, the question gave her just the opening she'd been looking for. "Yes, in fact." A beat passed before she added, "To 'Yashi."

Ah ha, well, that was one mystery solved. "Congratulations," Stephanie said as she released her hand. "And good luck."

Persis broke into the first smile that the other woman had seen on her face. As if scandalized by its presence, she tried to hide it with her newly freed hand as Stephanie matched it.

"You know, 'Yashi and I used to date for a little while in college," Stephanie said casually, knowing the instant the words escaped her mouth that it was a stupid question. Yes, Persis knew. And Persis was worried. Old flames were notoriously bad news.

Turning to her, Stephanie put up her hands defensively, palms turned out. "Just to make things clear before one or both of us gets the wrong idea, all yours."

Persis turned, gesturing for the journalist to follow her, presumably in the direction of food. Stephanie was beginning to think she'd disregarded that last statement when she said, "Well, at least you're honest."

That was disaster number one averted, Stephanie thought. Two if you considered drowning. If she could get to number five hundred, things might work out.

Escorted such to the general mess hall—for no other word would do for the room, a cross between a hotel lobby and an Old West cabin, justice without being insulting, she joined her companion in rooting through a well-stocked pantry and refrigerator, one of a set.

"You may want to take a little more than you want, and portable at that," Persis advised her, depositing her papers on a nearby table before peering over her shoulder and reaching past to steal a handful of carrots. Munching noisily in a manner somewhat at odds with her previous behavior, she added in response to the other woman's inquiring look, "Ethan's on cooking duty today. You don't recognize the name, but you get the idea. Hopefully he'll be evicted from the task by tonight."

"Man can't cook, huh?"

"He ruined ramen noodles a week ago."

Stephanie winced, and slid out from under Persis' arm to pocket a roll of crackers.

"So where am I to go from here? If I'm to get decent pictures in, assuming there's something to photograph, I need to get it done before the light changes."

"He said you were a skeptic." 'He' obviously implied 'Yashi. "Good." Persis reacquired her clipboard. "If you can eat on the go, then please." She accompanied her words with an appropriate gesture.

"No, please, after you…I haven't a clue where I'm going."

Persis gave her a peculiar look. "I may end up liking you after all," she said at last. "But it's not very likely."

The Jeep seemed to be the vehicle of choice for 'Yashi and his team, for it was a near-identical one that Persis led her to. With a journalist's eye for detail, however, Stephanie instantly spotted a hefty dent in the passenger's door as she circled around.

"I have to ask: What did that?" she said, pointing. "You don't have yetis around here, do you?"

"Not anymore," Persis remarked obscurely, and refused to say another word on the subject, instead starting the car and setting off.

"Not anymore? Oh, forget it. Will you put up with another question?"

"If it's not 'where are we going' or likewise stupid."

Stephanie shook her head, cradling her camera lovingly. "Nothing of the sort. Rather, how do you tell all the Jeeps apart? So far, two out of two have been red. Three out of three," she amended, spotting another rumbling in the opposite direction along a different path.

"We don't. There are actually sixteen or so, and they all have the same key configuration. Before you ask, they're red so we can find them."

"Do I want to ask where you got them all?"

"No."

"Fair enough," Stephanie shrugged, and returned to looking out the window, analyzing light, shadow, distance, and similar elements.

Pulling to a halt after a fifteen-minute drive, Persis stopped the Jeep next to three others, identical albeit lacking the dent. "'Yashi's waiting for you over there." She pointed off to the right. "If you get lost, yell for him, and he'll find you."

Without another word, she collected her papers—Stephanie, having sneaked a look at them during the drive, thought they looked like test results of some kind, perhaps carbon dating or x-rays—and swept off without another word.

Abandoned, however politely, Stephanie followed her directions and skirted her way around deep holes and huge piles, many overlaid with grid systems or important-looking metallic sensor equipment, none of which she knew the names of. Drawing on memories of visiting a national park as a middle-school kid, she made sure not to step on or disturb anything.

This, however, did not stop her from looking, or speculating.

_What are they doing here?_ she wondered. To her relatively untrained eye, the raw dig looked like a cross between _Raiders of the Lost Ark_ and _The Mummy Returns_. However, the vaunted unfriendliness of the proper owners of both those famous theatrical sites bore no resemblance to this place in Arizona. In fact, Stephanie was rather unnerved by the reactions of the people scurrying around. The typical reaction was to stop, stare, then wave frantically and call a polite but enthusiastic greeting before returning to their work…whatever that was.

Odd.

In such a fashion she finally came across 'Yashi. He was sitting patiently on a well-worn director's chair outside a large white tent, waiting for her.

"Good morning, Stephanie," he greeted her pleasantly. "I hope Persis wasn't too rude to you."

"Did you tell her to find me? Congratulations, by the way," she added, smirking at the faint look, somewhere between delight and embarrassment, that colored his face. "No, she was quite pleasant, and I've been advised to skip lunch."

"Good advice, really. If I wasn't the one to come up with the rotating schedule, I'd organize a witch-hunt for the man who did…anyway," he waved the topic away, "I trust you'd like some idea of what you'll be writing about."

"_If_ I don't turn around and go straight home," she warned him. "Seriously, 'Yashi, if you're pulling my leg, I…I…I don't know what I'll do, but it'll be bad," she snapped, furious for not having a better threat to hand.

"Whoa, whoa, Stephanie, calm down. No BS, I promise. Leave your stuff here, no one will steal it." He got up from his chair and motioned for her to leave the camera and notebook there, which she did, not quite understanding why but willing to play along for the moment.

"Now, Stephanie," he began, taking her by the elbow, "we're going to go into this tent, and I want you to say the first thing that comes to mind." Preempting her remark, he added, "_Seriously,_ my friend. Please?"

"All right, all right," she said with a sigh. "I'll try."

Without further ado, he unzipped the flap and ushered her inside.

On a table, stretched out full length, was a skeleton, kept from the elements by a glass case, one with a lid that could be slid aside for hands-on work. And, shamefully, only one phrase occurred to her.

"ET phone home," she blurted, feeling a blush spread over her face. And then it hit her, so hard that she was tempted to hit him.

"YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME!" she howled. "'Yashi, tell me I did not drive all the way out here for a UFO hoax!"

"Wait a second—" 'Yashi tried to defer her, but she was having none of it.

"I can't believe it! I can't believe that I almost believed you; I wonder who's more gullible in the end, you or I…for the last time, Sato, there are no crashed UFO's in Roswell, the Marfa lights are not little green men, the President is not an alien, and Area 51 is not allied with creatures from the planet Uranus! You wanted me to organize a scientific write-up on your cock-and-bull alien story?"

There was more. Lots more that she wanted to say, but she never got the chance, for 'Yashi took the opportunity created by her simple need to breathe to clap a hand over her mouth.

She almost bit him, just for spite.

"Stephanie, give me a second." Seeing that her mood was not helped by the hand across her face, he removed it. "No more screaming now…"

She ground her teeth. "It's a damn good thing for you that I left my camera outside, or you would be sporting it across your skull right now."

"Yes, I predicted that. Stephanie, listen. And listen closely. Just for a second, pretend that I'm not crazy, that I'm not basing my conclusions on fairy tales and tabloids, and that I didn't create this out of plaster." He gestured to the skeleton, which, now that she looked a little closer, didn't look to be made out of plaster at all. It looked as if it'd just been dug out of a graveyard where it had sat rotting for a thousand years. Now that she thought about it, despite the glass, she even thought she could smell dead air and decay, though surely that was just her imagination working overtime.

"Stephanie, this was dug up 60 feet below the surface. It was in a coffin, sealed with signs used by the native inhabitants of this area almost three thousand years ago." Eagerly, he continued. "Carbon tests prove it. And Stephanie, we've got a full lab downhill…DNA testing gives it a Terran origin."

She was tempted to storm out, she was tempted to hit him, and she was tempted to take him at his word. More than anything, she wanted to see the proof.

"Show me."

'Yashi winked, now that she wasn't screaming. "I thought you'd say that." He collected carbon copies and color-tagged reports and data sheets from the edge of the table. Handing them to her, he watched nervously as she flipped through it, faster and faster as she approached the end of the sheaf.

When she looked up a few minutes later, her face was ashen.

"'Yashi, swear to me this is all real."

He looked her straight in the eye, placing his right hand over his heart. "I swear by everything dear to me, by my life and the life of my beloved Persis. None of this is faked."

Stephanie's gaze shifted from the papers to the skeleton. "Oh my God. There's nothing else like this…Terran origin, DNA evidence… This means…this means…"

He nodded. "Right."

"You have more?"

"Bones, engravings, artifacts, a temple, even what we think is an account that we're still working on translating. Half of it is in some language we don't have a basis for…theirs, we think. The linguists we brought in say it's genuine, just unprecedented, like Basque. Totally unrelated to anything, though one of them swears up and down it has roots in proto-Japanese, or maybe proto-Japanese descends from it, she's not sure…"

"Oh my God," she repeated, stunned, totally ignoring 'Yashi's lecture about linguistics. Her fingers made sweaty marks on the papers as she gripped them unconsciously tighter, staring at the bones and the papers in turn, head moving like a robot stuck on the same two commands. A strand of hair had fallen into her slightly agape mouth, but she hadn't noticed yet.

"And Stephanie…"

She looked up at him. Kobayashi-maru Sato didn't think her eyes could get any wider, but they were about to test that limit.

"We think we've caught a live one."

Stephanie ran for her camera.

* * *

**Author's Note: YES, THIS IS RELEVANT. **Before you ask, _yes_, all our favorite idiots that make up the regular cast will be along in the very next chapter. I just wanted to set the stage—a different stage than last chapter. By the time I'm done, you'll beg them to go away. They will oblige. Be careful what you wish for. 


	3. 1'2: Thunder Rising

**Country of the Blind**

**Chapter Two: Thunder Rising**

**ON WITH THE SHOW!**

For the first time in almost six months, Yusuke could see the true color of the cushions on the couch, which were, in all fairness, no longer on the couch, and find the living room floor without a metal detector. With the windows thrown open, it even smelled better. Although the room was not completely clean, and hadn't been for years, the clutter was at least organized now.

A stack of dirty dishes, accompanied by a pizza box, sat in one corner, left over from uncounted dinners and weekend lunches in front of the TV set. He was seriously considering not even trying to wash those, instead settling for merely tossing them in a garbage bag and letting the waste-disposal workers handle whatever might be growing on the plates, cups, and silverware.

Against one wall, a heap of newspapers, magazines, TV guides, and other paper publications sprawled, obscuring almost two feet of wall and an equal amount of floor. Some cleaner than others, some old and yellowing slightly, they emitted the faintly musky of idle paper…lots of idle paper. Next to them, he had tossed the slips for the couch cushions. Surely they hadn't been that shade of beige to begin with, for if he looked—really looked—he could make out a faint pattern. What it was, he couldn't tell. It could have been flowers, or plaid, or stripes, but whatever it had been, it was long faded. He'd be lucky if the fabric didn't dissolve in the wash, which was that pile's ultimate destination.

The remote control to their dilapidated television set, missing for several weeks, had been excavated from beneath the cushions, which had seemed too obvious to search under, along with candy wrappers, ancient popcorn, and soda can tabs, the latter of which had been shoveled into a heap of general trash. There were even a pair of flattened soda cans and a beer can, faded beyond all recognition save for the smell, which had lurked undetected for, clearly, far too long. When he had shaken this last, several cigarette butts had fallen out, spraying ashes across the floor. Luckily, Yusuke had grabbed a trash bag earlier and now promptly consigned the lot to a deep dark doom in the local landfill, resignedly swabbing up the ashes with a damp paper towel.

His mother's stuff, which he wasn't even going to _try_ to mess with, got a pile all its own. She could do as she pleased with the eclectic collection.

Adjacent even to that was a collection of things that Yusuke had misplaced and not bothered to find recently. This adverb 'recently' extended from months ago, namely a school assigned-reading novel long lost and little missed, to perhaps a week past…specifically, the nauseously pink communicator unit that his employers used to get in touch with him to order him off to some godforsaken corner of the city or the spirit world, usually when he didn't want them to. In the name of self-defense and pure contrariness, he'd arranged to 'accidentally' lose the communicator in what he considered a bottomless heap of rubbish.

In other words, the living room floor.

Of course, so focused had he been on forgetting where it was, he'd outsmarted himself and actually forgotten. And now he had no excuse. It had been his idea, after all, to clean out the living room this morning. Not only was he the only one with time to do it at the moment, his mother Atsuko working diligent long hours in the interest of holding down her current job, he really wouldn't have felt comfortable leaving it for her to do.

Somehow it felt like repayment. She put up with him vanishing at odd times, and he did household things. She worked a normal job, and he…hunted demons. Oh well, so much for parallels.

Speaking of Atsuko, he hurriedly slipped the communicator into his pocket in case she should happen to wake up. At the moment, she was upstairs in her room, still asleep like most people at 7:30 AM on a Saturday, but the communicator did look uncomfortably like a girl's makeup case. Either Botan or Koenma had a sense of humor, probably Botan. He could always say it was Keiko's, but supposing she opened it? It didn't exactly contain blush or lipstick or whatever else one found in a makeup case.

Bundling the cushion slips into the washing machine, he set it on the appropriate water setting, hoping the cloth wouldn't simply fall to pieces. Dropping the lid closed, muffling the sound at the last second and jamming his index finger painfully between falling metal lid and static metal washer, he returned to the living room, sucking gingerly on the abused digit.

"All right, that's it for now," he declared to his audience of empty plates and coffee coasters. "I'm done. Where's the sports section?" he inquired of the newspaper shambles, which, to his relief, did not reply.

It had happened once.

Propping his bare feet up on the newspapers, he pulled a random sheet out, checking the date. A week ago. Fine. But it wasn't what he was looking for…rather, it was the local news section, which was not to his interest at all. There was always the off chance that there would be some tidbit about an unusual event that might have something to do with a demon or rogue spirit, and would therefore need a sharp lesson on sticking to it's own realm, but if there was a problem, he'd hear about it eventually, or one of the rest of his peculiar gang of demon-hunters would take care of it.

Discarding the sheet, and thus restarting the mess all over again, he rooted through the stack in pursuit of the sports page, or failing that, the comics, neither of which were readily in evidence.

Finally, he emerged from the papers with a nearly-complete newspaper, still folded into its precise arrangement. Although at first glance the classifieds were missing, it didn't plague him much. Surely somewhere in here there were sports.

"How come I didn't look at this?" he wondered, frowning at the front page. "Four days ago…where was I four days ago?"

After only a second, Yusuke rolled his eyes. "Oh yes. Either I was chasing that rat and his little minions through that downtown storage center, or I was trying to explain to Koenma how we ended up there anyway, never mind that _he_ was the one who sent us to the wrong end of town in the first place. Can't that toddler read a simple tip?" He counted backwards under his breath. "Yep, that was Wednesday, all right."

Complaining contentedly to himself about being reduced to pest control, albeit of a spiritual kind that involved blowing things up and knocking them down, he shook open the paper, sending several inserted glossy ads flying across the room, propelled by the morning breeze from the open window. They came to rest against the denuded couch, sliding underneath sneakily, joining junk that had been under there since Yusuke had thought Lego blocks the height of entertainment. Some of those abandoned building blocks were still under there, along with several checkers, the ace of spades, and a sock.

Yusuke spent several enjoyable minutes catching up on Wednesday's sports status, hunting for any updates on local baseball games that he might be able to get to and diligently keeping track of his favorite teams in any number of sports. Finally, having been reduced to an inch-long article on a British golf tournament and a bike ride, he abandoned it, picking up the world news section. Paging idly through it, he sprawled out on his stomach and laid it flat to see it better. His bare feet kicked several old TV guides away from the main bulk.

Halfway through, he stopped, attention caught by a picture. "Looks like an alien," he commented. "Who caught the Martian?"

Apparently, no one. Reading through the article, skipping all the science that didn't make much sense to him, he determined that it was a fossil, or near enough as no matter. The science community was apparently in chaos about a possible 'newly-discovered link in humanity's evolution'.

"That doesn't look human," Yusuke grumbled to the paper. "Looks more like a desert demon's bastard ancestor, more likely…" He paused, thought about that a little more, and squinted at the grainy picture. It didn't help the resolution any that the paper had been lying on the floor for four days.

"Shit," Yusuke said finally. "That _is_ a demon. Or was, back before it kicked it." The creature would have been obviously dead even if the article and the caption below hadn't already stated it to be supposedly over three thousand years old. Yusuke doubted it. Surely, in three thousand years, it would have just turned to dust like a vampire on a late night movie?

But then again, if it was a demon, would the body last longer? Even if it had been preserved in prehistoric alcohol or peat or tar, wouldn't there be some kind of clue that it wasn't Terran? At least, not by the contemporary definition of Earth, the one that stated there was only one inhabited, accessible dimension? The one that also happened to be totally false, although only a limited number of humans knew that? Surely there was only so far you could stretch a human-centric conclusion.

Yusuke didn't think humanity would appreciate learning about the existence of a totally new species, genus, or whatever was up the ladder from that as much as it would enjoy learning about a safely extinct race of predators. Considering how poorly humans got along with each other on totally flimsy bases, it was unlikely that a worldwide 'let's find out the truth about the universe' policy would have many good points to it.

Well, yeah, said Yusuke's practical side, but what're the chances of that?

Good point, subconscious. Besides, what wise guy would put together a skeleton out in the far west of…the United States of America with a half-baked theory involving parallel planes and supernatural beings? What would a demon be doing in Arizona anyway? It wasn't exactly in the neighborhood.

The teenager scrunched the sheet into a little ball, which promptly expanded the instant he let go of it, and tossed the paper back into the heap, feeling that he'd done his duty toward maintaining the status quo. Only then did he survey the mess he'd recreated.

"Whoops," Yusuke muttered, and kicked half-heartedly at the chaos. Several scraps of paper chose that moment to scoot across the floor, away from the still-open window.

Muttering choice words at the window, Yusuke stomped over, slipping ever so briefly on a loose paper, and closed it firmly.

A few seconds into his effort towards putting the widely spread heap at least back into one sprawling heap, the washer buzzed for attention, and he abandoned the paper project in favor of changing over the laundry, hoping desperately that the cushion slips hadn't dissolved. As it turned out, they were still intact, if one disregarded the frayed edges that had been there already, but the ghost pattern had vanished almost completely.

Yusuke tossed them in the dryer, along with some towels and a shirt that needed drying, and managed not to let the metal door clang loudly. Closing it smoothly, he didn't even smash his hand this time.

Audible even over the fresh sound of the dryer, Yusuke's stomach grumbled, and he obediently set on a search for breakfast, digging through the pantry. Atsuko must have gone shopping sometime, for there was quite a lot more than usual on the shelves. Despite the availability of handfuls of other breakfast foods, Yusuke grabbed a bag of potato chips and reassessed the project he'd just abandoned, the living room.

Desperate for something else to defer the inevitable moment when he'd actually have to finish what he'd started, he unlocked the front door and wandered outside in a giant T-shirt and a pair of old but very comfortable pants to get today's paper. Granted, that wouldn't help much with the living room, but it took his mind off of it.

Once he got back inside and opened the newspaper, he froze.

What had he just been saying about half-baked theories and unlikely chances?

All right, it was below the centerfold of the front page, and it was a short article even though most of the rest of it was on page eight, but his point was that someone was too smart for their own good.

**_Physicist Proposes Redefined Universe_**, the caption read. It went on to describe the work of a man called Dominic Massey, who stated that the structure of the universe required parallel planes to 'balance, so to speak, each other plane against the forces of probability chaos. These planes would be held together in groups of three by a form of trans-dimensional energy that can be postulated to act on the fabrics of the parallel dimensions in a similar way that gravity acts on mass in our plane. To remain spatially and temporally close, these planes would have to be quite similar, and could potentially contain other forms of life…'

Somewhere in that sentence Yusuke had turned the page, and having been confused from the beginning, was now even more confused by the technobabble. One thing, however, he did understand.

A human had guessed about the existence of the Spirit World and the Demon World. Not only that, he'd tossed that phrase about 'other forms of life' in there!

If there's one thing humanity loves, one of the many traits it happens to share with demon-kind, it's a conspiracy theory, especially if it can be backed up by logic and evidence, although neither race really needs the evidence when push comes to shove. As it happened, the 'evidence' was right on the opposing page, in the form of a rehash of Wednesday's article on the demon skeleton. There was no picture this time.

Something pricked at Yusuke's memory, and he turned back to the front page. He checked the author. In small print, the article disclaimed its writer to be one _Stephanie Erinyes_. Dropping the newspaper along with the empty potato chip bag, Yusuke retrieved the crumpled Wednesday edition from the nest of paper, deliberately ignoring the existence of the localized mess that he'd created. Relocating the photograph-accompanied article, he saw a familiar name in the byline—the same _Erinyes_ woman. It had to be. How many people had a last name like that?

Yusuke was getting worried. This sounded like something he did not want to get dragged into. But then again, he could be just paranoid. It would be best, he thought, to check his conclusions against someone who might just understand more than half the newspaper article, and if that person happened to be just as paranoid, if not more, so much the better.

Tearing off the front page so he could lay it side by side with the continuation and the previous article, Yusuke picked up the phone and dialed, retrieving one of the phone numbers he'd memorized from the depths of his memory.

On the other end of the line, he heard a distant ringing, and then another. When the third ring started, he tapped his fingers impatiently. It was perfectly possible that the cell phone had been left on the floor, signaling that the person he was trying to call was halfway across Japan or the Makai. The demons he knew had peculiar ideas about cell phones, something along the lines of them being a good idea as long as—and no longer than—they wanted to be found and talked to. After that, the little phone was likely to be abandoned somewhere where it would startle someone else by ringing at odd moments.

After a few more rings, he got an answering machine. A very _grumpy_ answering machine, which after the mandatory name and number, continued with:

"If you're calling to pester me, hang up. Now. Or else. If this is very important, leave your name and number, and I'll call you back if it's important _enough_. Record your good reason at the sound of the tone."

There was a click, followed closely by a beep.

Yusuke chuckled into the phone. All he could say in his defense was that, at least this time, it hadn't been _him_ who'd distributed the fox's cell phone number to pretty much every high school groupie girl in the area. By the sound of it, Kurama needed a new phone, and thus a new number. Yusuke made a mental note to mention it next time he had a spare moment.

"Hey, fox-boy, it's Yusuke. Look, I found some weird articles in the newspaper, yeah, I know, it wasn't on purpose or anything, and I think we may have a problem. Trouble is, I can't understand most of it, and I figure you…wait a second." A second beep had just interrupted the Spirit Detective's 'good reason'. He pulled the phone away from his ear and leered at it suspiciously. "Hello?"

He listened closely to the receiver again. It sounded like dead air, punctuated by a dial tone.

"Now hold on just one minute…"

The display screen read CALL TERMINATED.

* * *

Across the city, a cell phone skidded across the floor and hit a wall. Being a cell phone, it bounced slightly. On the other side of the room, one hand retreated back under a lump of blankets with an air resembling that of a hibernating bear just on the edge of being very annoyed when he was almost woken up. It was something along the lines of 'don't bother me, lest I tear your head off and then go back to sleep anyway'.

Five minutes later, almost the exact time it took the semi-human teenager curled under three layers of blanket to drift back to sleep, the phone rang again, somewhat muffled, as the cell phone was face down on the carpeted floor.

Had anyone been listening closely, he or she would have heard a subdued groan that actually sounded a little bit more like a whimper. As if resigning himself to the inevitable, Kurama reached out, tapping the bedside table for his cell phone. Not watching, he managed to knock over several other things before remembering that he'd thrown it into the wall not long ago. Fingernails that abruptly resembled claws tapped at the wood in irritation, leaving infinitesimal marks in the varnish. They joined a fair collection of other scratches where he'd taken out his annoyance in a similar fashion before.

The groping hand suddenly snapped toward the windowsill, where an ivy-like plant sat drooping to the floor, and clicked its fingers at the ivy. In response to the commanding gestures, the vines extended themselves, creeping across the carpet. Winding around the phone like very long fingers, the ivy managed to tote the patiently ringing device across the room despite the vibrations making it difficult to grip. Upon triumphant delivery to its master's waiting hand, phone and hand vanished into the blankets, and the ivy slowly returned to its static state on the windowsill.

Finally opening one eye, the fox regarded the number lit faintly on the display. It took him a few seconds to make sense of the numerals, but once he'd managed to find a match, he sighed, curled back into a ball, and accepted the call.

"What do you want, Yusuke? 'm asleep," he mumbled in the direction of the phone.

"I guess you haven't seen the paper yet, huh?" the Spirit Detective replied, sounding, to the still-mostly sleeping demon, far too awake.

"Luckily for you," he growled without any real malice, "I haven't even seen my alarm clock yet…oh, too late." Not so much throwing back the blankets he'd created a nest out of as dragging himself out from underneath lethargically, his eyes fell on said clock. "Now I'm really unhappy."

"Sorry, man," Yusuke sighed. "But this is important."

"Oh, right…the same way the _last_ thing you called me for was important?"

For a few seconds, static crackled over the line…or maybe it was potato chips. "Huh?" Yusuke said finally.

The fox-demon tried not to get angry. It was only Yusuke. "Never mind." If he'd already forgotten, there was no need to remind him. It had only been Yusuke being normal Yusuke. "So what's so bloody important that you have to call for my help at seven AM and past?"

Yusuke hemmed and hawed for a few seconds, and this time the crunch of potato chips was distinct. While he waited, Kurama pulled his covers back over his head, mussing his long hair hopelessly while trying to find the warm spot he'd just left.

"I don't know how to explain it, but it looks like some humans have found out about the other planes," Yusuke said finally. "And before you tell me that it's happened before, it's in the newspaper. Better check pages one and eight when you get up, all right? Call me back and tell me what you think."

This time the human was the one to hang up abruptly.

It was an all-time record of ten minutes later when the fox's curiosity got the better of his desire to go back to sleep.

_The demon world? In the newspaper? How'd it get there? _and, reflexively, _Not my fault!_

* * *

"That's crazy. There's no way someone can just guess something like that. Not out of thin air."

"Yeah, but think about it. The other worlds are real, right?"

"Well, duh," Kuwabara replied, tapping the top of Yusuke's head with his soda bottle. "We've been there. Remember? We got ourselves beat up."

Yusuke swatted the offending bottle away. "I know that! I'm not stupid! At least, not about things that really matter."

The taller boy chuckled. "Fail another test, huh?"

"Shut up. My point is, as the other worlds are real, there's gotta be proof of some kind. I don't know; he's an internationally famous scientist. I guess he could prove it."

Kuwabara frowned to himself. "Wait a sec. If this Massing guy—"

"Massey."

"What_ever_—is so damn famous, how come I've never heard of him?"

Yusuke pitched his own empty soda into a nearby trashcan. It bounced off the rail and rolled off the edge. "Damn. How much attention do you pay to science magazines anyway?"

His companion shrugged. "OK, I get your point. Still, Urameshi, you're being paranoid."

"Yeah. That's what I said right before I saw the article in this morning's paper. And before we got our butts hauled off to that Tournament. _And_ before Koenma turned up in the middle of one of my classes and told me to go hunt down demonic thieves. And before I got—oh _yes_—hit by a freaking _car_! And…"

"Whoa, hold it! I get it, I get it! You're worse than the shrimp." Kuwabara swigged the last of his drink and took aim at the trashcan himself. Much to Yusuke's annoyance, he sank it perfectly. "Three points. You lose. More importantly, I win."

"Shut up," Yusuke said again. "All right then, next game: bets on how long it takes the toddler to catch up with the daily news and send us running in all directions at once."

"Stakes?"

Yusuke locked his hands behind his head. "I dunno. You think of something."

"I don't care. Lunch."

"Fine. Whoever loses gets to pick where we eat, though. And I say it'll take him two days."

Kuwabara shook his head. "Three. No…a week. Then we'll get to laugh at him when he's that far behind."

Yusuke ran his fingers through his hair reflectively and checked his watch. "Why so long?"

His chuckle sounded distinctly evil. "He left us sitting in his office for at least two hours Wednesday while he took a nap or something. We got bored."

Yusuke hadn't been there for that. He'd been getting the rat bite through his arm healed. One of the parts of his job that he liked was that when you got hurt, for example, fighting oversized rats, you were fixed up with their time and effort, which they did an excellent job of. The part he didn't like was actually _fighting_ oversized rats that could bite your arm off. Now, he grinned. "I'm going to like this."

"You know that giant file cabinet behind his desk? The big grey one? Let's just say the toddler's papers are a little bit scrambled now. It should take him at least a week to notice."

"Wait a second; I thought those were locked. Very obviously locked, as I recall."

"Yeah, '_were'_ being the important word in that sentence. What does he expect, leaving Kurama in the same room as a lock? It took him maybe three seconds to have it in pieces. You should have heard him laughing."

Yusuke had to admit, Kuwabara had a point. Anything locked, sealed, or hidden was an open invitation for the kleptomaniac fox-demon to steal it—or at least move it somewhere else. "You're going to get yelled at."

"Me? Why? I didn't do anything…much. Besides, he'll blame it on his staff. He always does."

"Too true. I didn't think there was anything else he could pin on those ogres…until I overheard him giving them extra duty in one of the file rooms for breathing too loud while he was trying to think." Yusuke checked his watch for the third time in the last five minutes.

Kuwabara noticed. "Oi, stop twitching, will you? What are you waiting for, anyway?"

"It's ten o'clock," Yusuke informed him as he got up from the bench.

"So?" His companion showed no indication of moving.

"So it's been more than two hours since I called Kurama. That's enough time for him to get curious enough to start snooping around for any information I left out this morning."

"Why would he care?" Kuwabara asked skeptically. "Personally, I don't give a damn yet."

Yusuke shrugged. "You know demons. Paranoid as hell."

"Think you can actually find him? I doubt he'll be using his home computer."

"Yeah, I think so…maybe…"

* * *

Luckily for Yusuke's sense of ego, he located his red-haired teammate at the third library he tried, Kuwabara in tow. Making a rude gesture at the librarian who tried to scowl down the half-dead cigarette he'd stuck in his mouth reflexively but had let die out some blocks back, he sallied through the scanners that checked for un-checked out books and made his way through the bookshelves to the back row, where the computers left open to the general public were housed.

The library seemed mostly deserted. Not many people had chosen to visit the library at ten o'clock on a Saturday morning. In one corner, an elderly man was reading his way steadily through a large hardcover; at another table, a college student frantically typed at her laptop, making frequent references to a miscellaneous collection of text scattered across the table, her lap, and the surrounding floor. Somewhere in the bookshelves, at least two very young children shrieked happily and were frantically and audibly shushed by either their mother or an overworked nanny. Aside from them and the offended librarian, there appeared to be no one else there.

Kuwabara sighed obviously, clearly ready to give up the search. "Not here, Urameshi, can we go now? I think that old lady's started sharpening stakes behind her desk."

"At least try to sense him, why don't you?" Yusuke jabbed his teammate in the ribs with an elbow.

"Why bother?" Kuwabara grumbled. "If he doesn't want to be found, you know I can't pick up on him worth a…" He paused. Scowling, he warned Yusuke, "If you say 'I told you so', I'm gonna kick your ass."

Yusuke managed to refrain from punching a fist into the air. "Where is he?

The taller teen jabbed a thumb toward the back hallway. "In there."

Kuwabara led the way, and Yusuke edged the door open. Peeking around the heavy door, his eyes took a second to adjust to the light, or rather lack of it. The only illumination came from an active computer screen against one wall, blocked partway by a figure with long hair. Yusuke gave his companion a thumb's-up, and they let the door swing closed as they made their way through the darkened room, dodging plushy chairs clearly designed for patrons in search of a quiet and comfortable place to read…if someone had left the lights on.

"Hello Yusuke, hello Kuwabara," Kurama said in a normal voice without even turning around.

"How'd you know?" Yusuke asked, leaning on the back of a nearby chair.

"I heard your voices and your footsteps, and I know what your auras feel like. How did you know I was here?"

"I guessed."

"And guessed again, and then dragged us all the way across town to take _another_ guess…"

"Shut up, Kuwabara. How come you've got the lights off in here?"

"I like the dark."

"Whatever; your call. Find anything?"

"There's probably a lot more information that didn't get into the paper, because, well, it's a newspaper. Whoever these people are, they haven't been making their findings terribly public, at least as far as I can tell. Maybe it's just that whatever journals they've been submitting information to don't reprint on the Internet. So I looked up the author of those articles instead. Slightly easier. Not much more useful."

"That right," Yusuke asked rhetorically, looking over the fox's shoulder. He blinked quickly, shifting his eyes from the darkness all around them to the brightness of the computer screen. "And so far?"

"She and the discoverer of the skeleton went to the same college; she's been working on and off for _Pythia_ science magazine—that one had a transcript for an article on the archaeological dig, but just an overview—for six years and evidently used some connections to get there."

"Connections? With what? Or who?"

"I haven't gotten that far yet."

"Two hours and that's all you've got?" Kuwabara sprawled on the closest plush couch, taking up most of it. "You're slipping, Red."

Kurama closed the display windows with an air of frustration. He spun the chair around, shooting a glare past the humans. "I was _expecting_ help."

"Do your own work, fox."

Yusuke and Kuwabara both twitched, looking for the source of the familiar voice. Kuwabara jumped up from the couch. In all fairness, it was quite dark, and it is very hard to see someone dressed all in black in the dark. It took a second, but they managed to make out the form of the little demon, curled in a chair reading a large horror novel, and most of the way through it.

"Hiei? What are you doing here?"

"Being unhelpful," Kurama answered for him.

"You insisted I come."

Kurama growled something unintelligible, turning back to his computer screen and hunching his shoulders in an obvious sulk that said _I'm ignoring you now_.

"How can you read without any light? And why are you reading a human book?"

"There's plenty of light."

"You can read by…right." Hiei's sarcastic glare was easily visible, red eyes reflecting the glow from the computer screen to cut off Yusuke mid-question.

"And it's not a human book."

"I'm telling you, he's _not_ a demon, Hiei," Kurama insisted, evidently paying more attention to the conversation than he'd claimed and losing the unofficial I'm-ignoring-you game by default.

"He must be. No human thinks this much like a demon."

Kuwabara slapped his hands together, cutting off the rest of the demons' literary debate while squinting to see just who they were arguing over, to no avail. "Anyway…"

"Yeah, yeah. Give me a little more time," Kurama grumbled, returning to his computer. "One or both of you go find me any scientific journals that might be on the magazine racks."

"Right…" Kuwabara drawled. "You know, if it's all the same to you, I think I'll stay here. There's a librarian lurking somewhere out there who doesn't really like us very much."

* * *

Although Kuwabara relented and was sent out into the library proper, Yusuke stubbornly insisted on hanging around and waiting for Kurama to retrieve something—anything—from the massively tangled World Wide Web, although he was very quickly bored. For some time he amused himself by making suggestions, most of which were shot down. When he tired of that, he dared the wrath of the library staff over Kurama's growing frustration and went to find something interesting to read, coming back in after a few minutes.

When he flicked the lights on reflexively, both demons looked up and snarled two separate curses at him. Yusuke dug in his heels and growled back, upon which they decided fighting over the lights wasn't worth the effort. Now with enough light, he made himself comfortable and tuned out the fox's muttering at the computer in the most-common demon language. It didn't seem impressed.

A little later, his reading was interrupted by a curse he didn't know. Eyebrows raised, he marked the sound for further reference and set his book aside. Standing by the computer again, he asked, "What?"

"How the hell did she think it was a link in _human_ evolution?" Kurama grumbled. "It doesn't look human at all?"

He'd managed to find a computerized draft of one of the DNA checks. Amid the endless diagrams of genetic templates and lists of A, G, T, and C, which were interspersed with a healthy dose of question marks, there was a typed analysis—in English. In a separate window was a translation site that accepted copy-and-pasted information.

"Maybe she thought that would get the most attention," Yusuke suggested. "You know, from all the people still hunting Bigfoot to interview him. Or—gods forbid—someone over there's _smarter_ than you, huh?" Here he rapped his fist gently on his teammate's head, barely dodging a reflexive retaliatory swipe. "Maybe just possibly they know more about their own subject than you do?"

"But this isn't human at all," Kurama protested. "This isn't even remotely connected to humans."

"It's shaped like a human…kind of."

"So what? So am I," objected Hiei, who never could resist totally staying out of arguments like this.

The door creaked open to admit Kuwabara with the latest stack of potentially helpful magazines. "What'd I miss?" he asked curiously. "Is that from what they found?"

"Uh huh. I still don't know what it is doing—well, what it _was_ doing—way out there."

"Surely Japan isn't the only place with portals between the human world and the other worlds," Kuwabara pointed out. "We just don't police those."

"Good point," Kurama admitted. "And thousands of years ago, about the time this came from, there wasn't a barrier between the worlds. A lot of demons settled in the human plane. They kept the same language and traits and were probably pretty much the same species."

"What happened after the barrier was raised?" Yusuke asked.

"I don't know. I wasn't there. I'm not _that_ old. If we're lucky—"

"Hah!" said everyone else in the room simultaneously.

"—no one of the people investigating will start wondering where it came from if it's old enough to be a sport or dead end of a Terran species," he went on with a smile. "And if they do start worrying about parallel worlds, let's hope they can't sling some sort of radiation at the universe to open it."

Yusuke was about to say something, in typically graphic terms, about how badly that would suck, but he was interrupted.

"Someone coming," Hiei informed them all without looking up from his book. "Human. Female. Extremely angry."

As Kurama hastily shut down the Internet sites he'd accessed, probably illegally, the door opened again, heralding the entrance of the library lady who had objected to Yusuke and Kuwabara, insisting loudly that they leave, now and immediately, if not sooner.

Thus unceremoniously evicted, they retreated as a group to the back parking lot of the salon that backed onto the library for an impromptu conference, more accurately known as the four-way argument.

"So now what?" Yusuke asked them all, leaning against the graffiti-covered wall. "Hope for the best?"

"Humans are stupid." There was a car, probably belonging to one of the employees, parked in the alleyway, and Hiei had seated himself on its roof. Before everyone else could brush that statement off as just his normal bad attitude towards humanity and (almost) everything connected with such, he elaborated, "They'd rather bend their current set of rules than change them completely, even when faced with the obvious. Why should they start talking about a whole new model of the universe when they can just label that demon corpse an extinct native species and have done with it?"

"They—we—_are_ talking about a completely new model, Hiei! That's part of the problem."

"You're halfway right," Kurama corrected him. "Humans change their rules to incorporate new ideas. But usually the rules get bent so far that they change completely. And there is always someone who sees through the double-talk and says that the sky is blue."

"Even when it's red."

"Yesterday evening's sky was very red."

"Exactly."

"Wait, wait, hold up a second," Yusuke stopped them. "Did I miss something?"

"I think what we're getting at is that when you make rules, someone breaks them, and then the rules turn out to be wrong anyway, which doesn't bode well for what's happened in America. So our point is that something's going to have to be done." Kurama kicked his heels against the car's tire, having commandeered the hood for himself.

"Not by us, of course," Kuwabara pointed out.

"Not by us," Yusuke agreed. "That's America. We've got enough to run around after in Japan. It's not our problem."

This was unanimously agreed to, one of the few times all four of the Spirit World's troubleshooting crew agreed on anything.

"However," Yusuke added, "we ought to let Koenma know."

"Why?" asked the rest of his team.

A patently evil grin spread over his face. "Because otherwise nothing will get done for a while, and the more time we wait, the longer it's going to take to get done. And I kinda like the world the way it is. Apparently his papers are a bit scrambled right now…isn't that right, guys?"

Kuwabara looked faintly sheepish. The demons pretended not to have the faintest idea what he was talking about. Due to long practice, they were very good at this.

"And what if he doesn't have a team to deal with America?" Kuwabara asked.

"Then it's his problem," Yusuke dismissed it. "Not ours."

"I'll let you know if I hear anything," Kurama volunteered. "Maybe not the moment I hear about it. But you'll get it eventually."

"Gee, thanks for the effort," Yusuke grumbled. "Oh, and try not to add things to it this time, all right, fox-boy?"

"I don't know what you're talking about," the redhead said huffily. "And it was boring."

"Yeah, well, once you started to elaborate, it was _wrong_!"

"It was more interesting though."

"Oh forget it," Yusuke rolled his eyes. "I give up. It's lunchtime anyway."

"Good idea, Urameshi. Hey, as we're going to tell Koenma anyway, does that invalidate the bet?"

The meeting broke up in a general lunch-ward direction. Kurama looked up at Hiei.

"I'd say 'this is going to be interesting', but every time I say that, something bad happens."

"What's the difference?"

Yusuke poked his head back around the corner. "Oh, good, you're both still here. Meet us on the roof of my school later. Maybe three o'clock. That'll give me enough time to drop by my house and pick up the communicator so we—fine, I—can call Botan so we can find out if we're supposed to be doing anything. Although if the toddler's found out about you two messing with his stuff, you might have to stay behind. I'm surprised he lets you into his palace anyway."

_To Be Continued._

**Author's Note:** Our lazy boys, huh? Too bad for them. The omnipresent fanfiction Female American Team doesn't exist. I have tried and will be trying to explain certain anomalies away, specifically, the language connection several people jumped on. I do have an excuse for that (if you caught the proto-excuse above, well done). Be patient, but go ahead and keep on pointing out anomalies. I like anomalies; they give me a chance to be smart.


	4. 1'3: Not Our Job

**Country of the Blind**

**Chapter Three: Not Our Job**

**Disclaimer: **Due to much good fortune which I had absolutely nothing to do with, _Yu Yu Hakusho_ does not belong to me. If I did I would barter it for the _Starship Enterprise_—any of them. But that's just me. Enjoy.

**ON WITH THE SHOW! **

Some things are universal. These things include, but are not limited to, death, taxes, conspiracy theories, bad breath, and equally bad cell phone connections.

Yusuke shook the little annoyingly pink device in frustration for the third time and resisted throwing it over the edge of the school building to watch it shatter into a million pieces and laugh triumphantly. He wasn't going to do that, of course. Not only would he get yelled at—again—for breaking the communications device, he'd look stupid, because gloating over a victory over a handheld collection of wires and screws and plastic isn't too heroic.

So instead he tapped it on the railing a few times, snapped it open and shut and tried to get a connection to the Spirit World—again. This was becoming damn familiar.

"You know what's really weird?" he asked rhetorically. "If you stand in the right place you can get coverage from human networks, in the demon world, with your average cheap cell phone. But if you try to call your bosses with a phone _they_ gave you with a _guarantee_ it'll work, you can't get shit."

"Still no luck?"

Yusuke managed to refrain from throwing the communicator at Kurama, who was sitting on the inactive AC unit looking aloof and bored. He wasn't sure whether the question was sarcastic, but he was willing to bet that it was. "Whaddya think?"

When he received no answer, he snorted in disgust and annoyance and turned back to his impromptu course on Thing Repair 101. Not for the first time, he wondered why Koenma hated him. He had to, to give him a team that got on his nerves so much.

Moments later, he took that back. Koenma picked on him because he annoyed the godling. On purpose, of course. The immature demigod hadn't given him a team so much as a pair of bodyguards and added someone who didn't really know the meaning of 'none of your business' because it was easier than trying to get Botan to talk her way out of blabbing her head off. And that his team couldn't walk up a staircase without getting into a fight (with each other) was actually one of their strengths. Just because they didn't agree with each other didn't mean that they couldn't cooperate when it was actually important. The constant infighting and petty quarrels kept them on their toes and staved off boredom.

A burst of slightly different-sounding static pulled his attention away from his internal thoughts and to the communicator, which sounded like it was finally getting through. It buzzed and hissed for about thirty seconds before clearing up partway into a picture of a young woman with curly blue hair, peering at the screen curiously. Her hair kept whipping into her face, and as she used her free hand to push it back, she tilted back and forth haphazardly. This, along with the motion in the background, played havoc with the picture.

"Yusuke?" Botan greeted him, as if she wasn't sure. "What's up?" For someone who was the equivalent of the Angel of Death, she sure did sound like a high school girl sometimes. She squinted at the screen through flyaway hair. "Have you turned fuzzy?"

"No," he snapped at the little screen. "This thing isn't working."

"Hold on a second," Botan responded briskly, looking away from the camera's pickup. "I'm thirty thousand feet up, let me land."

"Well, no wonder I couldn't get through," Yusuke complained to no one in particular.

By now the conversation had caught the attention of the two demons and Kuwabara, two of which abandoned being sarcastically bored and impatient in favor of peering over Yusuke's shoulders. Hiei stayed back, refusing to take part in the conversation as ever.

After a minute or so of static interspersed with clouds and sky, Botan's face reappeared in front of a penthouse apartment balcony or skyscraper roof view of an urban center that could have been anywhere in thirty or forty different countries.

"Hi, guys," she greeted the three that the communicator could pick up. "This is unusual. I mean, for you to call me instead of the other way round. Usually it's me hunting you all down."

"Yeah, well, we found something weird," Yusuke told her, resigned to another round of really-you're-sure. "And we think it might turn into a problem. Can you get over here and see if we're jumping at shadows?"

Botan's face went through a few interesting contortions, finishing in the one that reminded Yusuke uncomfortably of a pampered cat with a helpless bird or mouse or other small animal. "You are asking for help?" she whooped. "_You?_"

"I'm asking for _information_, Botan," Yusuke snapped. "Because I don't want to have to bother with this if it's not important, and if it is, I want to stomp on it before it gets big enough to kill me or something equally nasty!"

His manager looked suitably impressed, if still a bit skeptical. "Wow, this must be pretty big if it's got the victor of the Dark Tournament scared," she admitted reluctantly, and then smiled mischievously at his expression. "Or you're just overreacting," she added over his annoyed protest that he was 'not _scared_, damn it!'

"All right, all right," she waved him off when she recovered from a bout of the giggles. "I'm coming. Where are you?"

"Hanging out on the roof of my school. Where are you?"

"London, actually. Don't look at me like that! I'll duck into the Reikai and cut travel time that way. Don't go anywhere for five minutes or so, ok?"

"Five minu—damn." The connection had been cut from the other end. "That's a damn useful way to travel."

Botan was being optimistic, as per usual. It was actually more towards a quarter of an hour before she tumbled out of the gathering stormy-looking clouds to somewhat less than a ten-point landing on the flat rooftop, by which time two separate squabbles over trivial concerns had broken out, a full-scale fight had been averted, and a shouting match over the railing between Yusuke, Kuwabara, and some other high school students had ended in a draw that both sides loudly claimed to be their victory.

Making a noise halfway between a whimper and an offended snort, she accepted Kuwabara's hand up and dusted herself off, straightening her hair and kimono fussily. "Thanks," she said finally. "I blinked in a little too soon and a bit too high. That's going to be a heck of a storm once it breaks."

"What's 'blinked in'?" Kuwabara asked.

She giggled and slapped him on the back of the head. "You didn't think I flew halfway around the world, did you? I can transport directly back to the Underworld Palace from anywhere in the human world, else how would I get my job done in any sort of time? And from there I can 'port back out to anywhere. It's not that easy in the demon world though," she added. "Hi, everyone."

"So if you can turn up anywhere," Yusuke pointed out, "why the hell did you blink back in so high? Especially if you knew there was a storm up there."

"I _didn't_ know there was a storm up there, idiot!" she scolded. "And besides, it's easiest not to change altitude. You've all seen how high the palace is, I have to go way too far up to get decent air space. Thirty thousand feet there means I'm thirty thousand feet up here. Otherwise I get disoriented."

"Oh. Still seems damn inconvenient though."

Botan waved her arms dismissively. "Never mind how I get around, what have you found that's so important?"

Yusuke glanced around at his friends for support. They stared back. With no help forthcoming, the Spirit Detective shrugged and said briefly, "Humans have discovered demon remains, guessed about the other worlds, and plastered it all over the news." He was exaggerating, of course. A handful of newspaper articles and Internet sites were hardly 'plastering'.

From the look on Botan's face, she was about thirty seconds away from saying 'so what?' Instead, what she said was, "Um, Yusuke, they've been doing that for years; it gets lost, ignored, or laughed at. And, in case you've forgotten, human involvement _supports_ the Dark Tournament."

"I know that! I'm not likely to forget them, either." Yusuke still wasn't sure whether his real enemy in that deadly game had been the fighters or their sponsors. The sponsors had certainly put about as much effort into screwing them up. "But I—we think this is different. Those bastards kept it to themselves so they could exploit it. And the newspaper didn't present it like a Loch Ness Monster sighting, they sounded serious."

"There are six different scientific journals presenting the three-world theory as a viable model, and four that mentioned the artifacts found in the southwest US," Kurama chipped in. "Three had both in close proximity."

"You mean you guys hadn't heard about this?" Kuwabara asked.

Botan shook her head and seemed to be considering it.

"Pay up, Urameshi." Kuwabara stuck his hand out.

Yusuke flipped him off without even looking at him. "Drop dead."

"I'm not refereeing that," Kurama promptly informed Botan, who was ignoring the both of them.

Botan threw up her arms, barely missing braining Yusuke with her oar on purpose. "All right! All right! Let's go. You can talk to Koenma about it, should he have time. Maybe he heard something and didn't tell me."

"Yeah, because you'd tell the worlds," Yusuke taunted.

"Shut up, you, or I'll leave you behind," she retorted half-heartedly.

"Wait, how can you transport all of us?" Kuwabara asked. "Can you?"

Botan stopped short. "Yes…I think so…"

"I don't like the sound of that," Kurama muttered.

She grinned at him, changing theory in mid-stride. "Of course I can! We just won't fly."

Hurriedly, she directed them to gather in a rough circle—or failing that, at least in a loose group—around her, which they did, after persuading Hiei that yes, he was coming, and no, he couldn't do anything about it.

"Ready, everyone?" Botan asked, glancing around. "Okay, here we go…"

Yusuke could never aptly describe the transition from the human world to the spirit world. One moment he was standing on the roof of his school, familiar if hated place, and the by the next heartbeat he was in a totally different dimension, where city skyscrapers and urban sound, air, and smell were replaced by the unnervingly different atmosphere of the Reikai Palace and surrounds.

But the instants between urban Japan and mythical castle he never knew how to describe. What on one occasion seemed to be a sensation similar to being immersed in quick-moving water felt at other times like a feeling of static electricity coursing through his body and soul, which went on forever but was over by the time he rematerialized in the Spirit World. Sometimes he saw only darkness, so deep that it blinded him and so still that it seemed to move; otherwise a flash of white light, or blue, or rich gold, burned into his eyes even through closed eyelids so that the first thing he always did upon regaining his awareness of surroundings was rub his hands into his eyes forcefully to clear them.

Once his eyes had cleared, the next thing to assault his senses was the smell. Used as he was to big-city smog and industrial products, filled with the overwhelming general smell of many, many _people _in a comparatively small space, the unusual cleanness of the air around the Palace never failed to surprise him. Either the denizens of this realm had developed the best air-filtration system ever known, or they did not use energy sources that produced waste products.

Yusuke had never asked, not being overly curious about such things, but he suspected that the Palace ran mostly on the peculiar brand of magic that provided the power of its denizens. He did wonder how the big-screen TV in Koenma's office, used, he suspected, more for spying on people than anything else, had been connected, and whether they'd been forced to bow to the necessities of electricity. He could have sworn he'd seen a distinctly human company's mark on it last time he'd been in there, despite the ornate decoration that had been plastered all over it, which he considered in quite bad taste, as little as he cared about such things.

But no matter.

They'd materialized not in the grand entrance hall of the Palace, a space the size of a pair of football fields combined, but in a back room open along one wall to the air. No balcony or picture window this; the wall simply wasn't there. Below, should anyone care to lean over, a distance that seemed, due either to an optical illusion or differing natural laws, to be immeasurable gaped. Small figures could sometimes be seen below; if the wind was right or forces within didn't distort the aura of reiki that surrounded everyone and everything.

As far as he was concerned, Yusuke would never be able to find his way through the palace on his own; he ended up at a different starting point almost every time and had failed to establish landmarks. It was if the interior of the palace _shifted_ constantly, standing as it did on the edge of the lands beyond and the barrier separating it from the human and demon worlds.

Perhaps in response to this tentative position, the internal geography seemed to be in constant motion. Doors and passages appeared where he was fairly sure none had been before. Corridors projected a vision of infinity and then ended up as dead ends two meters past the threshold. The file rooms he'd gotten glimpses of occasionally were the only consistent part of the gargantuan citadel; they were always, without fail, in a state of chaos.

So he no longer bothered to count the doors or junctions between the room they'd landed in this time and Koenma's main office, which seemed to move despite being always roughly the same inside. It was a relief to leave the shifting hallways and come face to face with his boss.

As the little cavalcade entered, Koenma was to be seen behind his desk, stamping papers and finding time between muttering sullenly and grumbling furiously to actually read some of them. There was a complicated system of stacks developing across the desk, which seemed to have grown larger to include them all. Quite a number of sheets had been tossed in a wastepaper basket now quietly overflowing.

Yusuke kicked aside a paper airplane made of thick parchment that had made it all the way across the room and closed the door. Only at the sound it made did the demigod look up.

"What are you…all…doing here?" he asked in confusion. In a hiss evidently not supposed to be heard, he added, "Botan, those two aren't supposed to be in here without supervision!"

Hiei and Kurama sighed more or less in unison, an effect rather spoiled by the smirks, not to mention Kuwabara's outright laugh.

Koenma quickly tried to cover his mistake. "If you're bored, Yusuke, I can find a smuggling ring for you to deal with…somewhere." He put down his stamp, which oozed gold ink all over the desk, and began to shuffle in a pile of paper. "At least, I think so," he added.

"Not interested," Yusuke dismissed him. "I found something bigger."

Koenma contrived to look surprised and skeptical, which was remarkably effective despite the perpetual pacifier. "Oh, really?"

"Yeah, the Spirit World and the Demon World ended up in the paper."

"And the Internet," Kurama added.

"And lots of magazines," contributed Kuwabara.

Koenma's reaction was, more or less, the same as Botan's, along the lines of "Guys, this is nothing new."

Yusuke scowled. "Yeah, yeah, I've seen the tabloid articles. But _this is different!_ Don't ask me how I know, I just know. You better tell me that the barrier's up all the way."

Koenma glared over the Spirit Detective's shoulder at the two demons. "Kurama, put that down! Obviously not," he continued, over the fox's half-hearted excuse, "or they couldn't have gotten through, even with Botan escorting you all, without setting off a dozen and more alarms. But there haven't been any major breaches, or I would have sent you all off to investigate. Even that rat was a minor incident."

"The problem isn't here," Kuwabara told him. "What about border crossings in North America?"

"North America?" Koenma said as if he didn't know where it was or what it was. "I haven't gotten a report from there in years."

"Yes, you have, sir," Botan corrected him patiently. "I believe that's the most recent one over there." She pointed to the parchment airplane, now slightly smudged with a sneaker print.

"Really?" Koenma looked genuinely clueless. "I thought it was junk mail."

The ferry-girl rolled her eyes. "Toss me that, someone," she sighed, covering her eyes with one hand and extending the other, a pose that looked very good on a classical statue but completely failed to lend itself to catching airborne paper airplanes.

By now, realizing that they were in for a discussion, Yusuke's little posse had spread itself out across the room, settling in for however long they ended up staying. Kuwabara had commandeered two of the chairs that migrated in and out of the room from time to time, spreading his full lanky length across one and overflowing his feet to another, while Kurama had seated himself against the wall where he couldn't be accused of stealing anything. Being closest to the parchment missile's impromptu landing pad, the fox was the one who tossed it in the general direction of the rest of the room.

Yusuke himself had cleared off a corner of his boss's desk, and annexed it for himself, so he was the one who caught the airplane. Unfolding it with difficulty (it was a very complex style), he scanned the first page. "You know, I can't read a word of this," he told the room at large.

Koenma climbed onto his desk, generating a veritable snowstorm of paper, to wrest it away from the human. "That's because it's in English, idiot," he snapped, rolling it into a quick cylinder and taking a swing at Yusuke's head. He missed. Clambering back to his chair, he rifled through drawers before finding what looked like an old-fashioned monocle. "Ah ha!"

"What's that?" asked Kurama curiously.

"Mine; and I _would_ notice if it went missing."

"I was just _asking_…"

"More seriously, it's a…" Yusuke trailed off.

Koenma held it to his right eye and squinted with the other one. "A translator for written words. Very useful. Hold on a second."

Yusuke gave him two before jumping on him again. "How can you not know what's going on? I thought…" He paused. He hadn't.

"I mean, doesn't the Spirit World apply everywhere? Botan was just in London, right?"

Koenma continued to read, but he tried to explain, breaking off at odd moments to mutter to himself. "It does. The worlds lie parallel, but that's a lot of area for one organization to cover, even if it is supervised by marvelous me. Several thousand years ago, the Spirit World was broken up into divisions to cover each general district of the human world. The spheres of authority are determined by culture beliefs and physical landforms. So we've got a North American district, which has a history of keeping their noses out of things. That's why I never read their reports, Botan." He glared over the monocle at her. "It's a waste of time. They all say 'Nothing to report, sitting on hands', et cetera."

"Does that one?" she asked curiously.

"No," he muttered, and buried himself in the parchment again. Continuing, he went on, "The South Americas got broken up into several districts that I can't remember right now."

"Some supervisor."

"Shut up, Kuwabara, I'm talking. Anyway, Africa's in bits too, as is India. The denizens are mostly all adapted to their local parallel areas. You'd see all sorts of creative guises in India, lots of cold-resistant spirits in the Russian area. I wanted to stay in Japan, so I got to. I do have the last word, but no one asks for it."

"Got it." Yusuke scratched at his hair. "Wait a second, who deals with the demons?"

"No one." Koenma snorted. "Ask those two"—a wave of a hand in the general direction of Kurama and Hiei, the latter watching from the top of a file cabinet—"to tell you the story some time. The Demon World is a bad place for gods."

Yusuke turned to his friends, curious. "Well?"

"It's the oldest story there _is_, Yusuke. We killed them."

"Your _gods?_"

"Back at the beginning of time."

"You're kidding! How come?"

Kurama grinned nostalgically. "Long story, and complicated, but basically…they tried to boss us around."

A long pause while Yusuke and Kuwabara chewed this over. "Well, yeah," Kuwabara said finally. "That's what gods _do_."

"They didn't deserve to give orders," Hiei explained.

Yusuke folded his arms. "Who or what decided that?"

Both demons gave him patronizing stares. "We killed them, didn't we?"

There had to be a flaw in that logic, but for the life of him Yusuke couldn't figure out what it was. From a demon's point of view, only the strongest could give orders—and expect to be obeyed instead of killed. If gods could be killed, that made them weak; thereby justifying the killing. It was a quintessentially demonic story, even in short.

"Right…" Kuwabara said finally. "No wonder no one bothers."

"Who said that no one bothers? We just don't have the gods we began with. Or had a hundred years ago, come to that. In human terms, it's a high-risk job."

The sound of papers being stacked interrupted. "See how much I can get done while you don't try to argue with me?" Koenma asked rhetorically.

"Whatever. What's the verdict?"

"The verdict, Yusuke, is potentially not good. Other than that, I'm not sure. These guys" —punctuated by a scowl at the parchment— "don't want to get up and investigate."

"You ordered them to lie low three hundred years ago."

"Not now, Botan—what?"

Botan rolled her eyes. "You sent the American Department a very angry note ordering them to keep out of all human world affairs, and not to interfere with anything, no matter what. You may also have tentatively authorized going after rogue spirits, but I wouldn't bet on it."

Koenma looked very confused. "Why would I do that?"

"I don't remember!" she shouted. "Who cares? They listened!"

"For three hundred years?" everyone said.

"Any-way…" the demigod drawled, trying to regain his lost attention. "The local monitoring department reports a possible discovery of the other worlds. Their recommendation is, and I quote, 'wait for them to blow themselves up', that having been their suggestion for everything bigger than a bar fight for as long as I can remember. I must have put a cynic in charge over there."

"Don't look at me. I can't remember all that."

Koenma threw up his hands. Papers flew. "All right! All right! We may possibly have a problem on our hands. But I need more information before I decide what to do."

The Spirit Detectives looked at each other a little uneasily. "Uh, Koenma, we're not exactly a spy team," Yusuke pointed out.

"We hit things," added Kuwabara.

"I know. I know better than that." Koenma shuffled through the drawers of the desk again. "Where did it go?"

Botan shook her head despairingly. "Those drawers are bottomless pits," she said in a stage whisper. "No one can ever find anything. I'm surprised he found the monocle. Those things _eat_ people."

"Botan! _That was an accident!_"

She rolled her eyes again. "Fine. We got him back after a couple of days," she added, _sotto voce_—for Botan.

Koenma swore. "It's not here. Whatever." Instead of whatever he'd been looking for, he pulled out a megaphone. Those drawers evidently were not your typically three-dimensional drawers.

The team got a second's warning—Botan clapped her hands over her ears. They did the same just in time.

"HEY, EVERYONE!" Koenma bellowed. "STAY OUT. SERIOUSLY! I'M BUSY!"

He lowered the megaphone. Everyone flinched.

"Oh, stop that," he said defensively. "The P.A. system went down Thursday."

"Are you thinking of sending a ghost?" Botan asked.

Koenma grinned at her. "That's right." After pausing for a second, thinking, he added, "Jesse, I think. Hush, everyone." He glared around the room, rather pointlessly as no one was talking.

With rather a dramatic flourish, he held out two hands. A few seconds passed, wherein he looked merely rather silly. But then he focused intently on the space between his hands, and they began to glow faintly blue. The glow intensified and then seemed to draw back in on itself, collecting in his palms.

Eventually, a rather shapeless object appeared in his hands. He held it up triumphantly. "Got it!"

"What is it?" Kuwabara asked from his chairs, beating everyone else to the punch.

"It's a focus, and they're difficult to summon like that, so I don't know why nobody's applauding," Koenma sulked.

"Because nobody cares, toddler."

Koenma briefly looked like he was considering throwing the 'focus' at Hiei, but refrained, because he would probably never get it back.

"Hiei, stop it. Is it really?" Kurama got up and leaned over the desk, reaching for the lump of melted metal. The demigod snatched it away. "I'm not…" He broke off with a sigh and a shrug.

"Botan, fill me in," Yusuke pleaded. "What's it _for?_"

Botan clapped her hands together. "A focus, Yusuke, holds essential traces of a given spirit. With one, the spirit can be summoned from Limbo and sent on errands in the mortal planes. Without a focus, one would actually have to go down into Death and not only find the spirit, but force or persuade it to come back, and that's near-impossible. It's hard enough to snatch one in the first place."

Comprehension dawned. "So you're going to send a ghost to investigate?"

"Yep!"

"Botan, please don't say 'yep'."

"Sorry, sir. Anyway, we use ghosts for minor errands quite often, because they can transport within as well as between the worlds—following?"

"Yeah."

"Most can read minds, and carry things. Not only that, mortals can't see them. Even those with second sight, like you, Kuwabara, see them only as a flicker, because their essence is back here." She gestured at the lump of metal. "Metal's good; it holds energy. Even better if the metal was something really important to them."

"It just looks like a hunk of metal," Kuwabara pointed out.

"It used to be a model he was building, I think, mixed with the steel of the bullet that killed him."

Yusuke pulled a face.

"That would work," Hiei said. "It doesn't get much more personal than that."

"Damn right," Koenma said cheerfully. "One of my better ones. Now, if you'd all come over here? A circle would be good."

The group assembled around the desk in what was definitely not a circle. The demigod boosted himself onto the top of the desk and sat on it, holding the amalgam of steel.

"Think about what you know about the problem," Koenma instructed them. "Just about that, please…let's see." He looked down at the focus, and managed to whistle around the pacifier.

The whistle echoed oddly, lone note continuing long after he'd stopped. As the echoes died, a shape formed at the edge of the group.

It might have been a normal boy, once. Now it was a hunched and frightened creature with shaggy, unkempt black hair, which mostly concealed blue eyes turned into strobe lights by violent blinking. He was clad in a brown jacket and pants that looked weather-whipped and worn. The ghost could have been anywhere from twelve to twenty-two when he died.

Koenma snapped his fingers at it. "Jesse D'arkos, obey. Seek, see, listen, and find."

The shade of Jesse D'arkos straightened up, trying to get his mane out of his eyes. Holding it back with one hand, he reached out with the other one, brushing it across the room in front of him as if scooping the whole chamber into his grasp.

The hand was nowhere near him, but Yusuke still felt it as if the ghost had laid hands on him. Yusuke tried not to flinch from the touch. His fingers were icy cold, and clammy, like flesh left too long in a bath. He tried not to think about the fact that the boy was dead, an effort helped by the fact that Jesse's touch pulled all his memories on the discovery to the front of his mind, leaving no room for other thoughts. His vision blurred for a second as the room was replaced by the newspaper article.

Shaking his head as Jesse pulled his hand away, he watched as the rest of the team reacted to the shade's method of extracting information. Kuwabara shuddered, and Hiei snarled for a split second—he hated to be touched. Kurama took it stoically, although Yusuke could have sworn he saw his hands clench.

Having obeyed his first command, the ghost of Jesse D'arkos vanished, and the group broke up. The entire process between the shade appearing and disappearing had taken no more than five seconds.

"That was damn creepy," Kuwabara complained. "Do they always do that?"

"Only when they need information to start with. Like a tracking dog with a scent."

Yusuke folded his arms around himself, maintaining the illusion of noncommittal confidence while actually trying to warm himself up. The presence of the ghost had chilled him in a way he'd never experienced before. "Now what?" he asked, to cover his discomfort.

Koenma shrugged. "I don't know how long it will take him to return. It's implanted in all the ghosts we use to return after an hour if they've found nothing, but it could be a lot quicker than that."

Kuwabara collapsed back into his chairs. They creaked slightly, as most chairs will do upon being flopped into. "Good thing I didn't have anything to do today." He folded his arms behind his head. "Better than getting rained on. Wake me when it gets back."

Yusuke kicked a chair leg in passing. "Lazy."

"Oh yeah? And you're planning on what?" The taller boy opened one eye lethargically.

As usual, Yusuke didn't have an answer for a question like that. "Who cares?"

Botan giggled, as she was wont to do. "I'm sure he won't mind if you hang out in here," she told them, jerking a thumb toward Koenma, who was ruffling through his desk drawers again. As heads turned, automatically following her gesture, he pulled his hands out with a yelp, shaking them. Green glowing liquid flew off them, spattering the desk. Where the drops fell, the enchanted wood began to steam.

"Don't mind me," Koenma waved his hands. "I'm not doing anything. What? Yes. Yes, you lot stay here. I'm going to find someone disposable to clean out this desk. Yusuke—keep those two away from it, would you?"

"No one trusts us," Kurama lamented as the demigod clambered out from behind his desk and jetted out of the room, Botan in tow. She waved a cheerful farewell as she was dragged by her ponytail toward the door.

"You're surprised?" Hiei asked rhetorically.

In the background, the door slammed, and Botan yelped, "Leggomyhair!" in one breath.

"I like people to trust me."

"Yeah, so they don't suspect you when things go missing."

"That's not very fair, Yusuke." He paused to think. "True, though," he added.

"One point," Yusuke immediately tallied up.

Kuwabara abandoned his feigning of sleep. Yusuke was catching up on his score. "Hey! For what?"

"Catching Kurama in a lie. That should earn me at least one point."

"That wasn't a lie."

"Ha! No points!"

"Why you…"

"No points!" Kuwabara fended off Yusuke's objections with much waving of hands and a gratuitous 'loser' gesture, which almost sent the argument into the next dimension, that of full-out fight. "And no arguing! Now what were you talking about, Kurama? I haven't heard this story before."

Yusuke hadn't heard it either. Granted his experiences with demons were limited mostly to fighting with them, but he was getting the idea that he was missing out on something big here. "Yeah. Tell us."

The fox had sat back down in his earlier seat against the wall. Now he looked up at them both. "Well, like I said, it's the oldest story the youkai have. There are two versions, a song and a story. The song you only usually hear sung by trained actors, or demons who are very drunk. Almost every demon child intelligent enough to listen learns it almost before they can speak."

"Don't let him sing it," Hiei advised. "It is supposed to be sung. But don't let _him_ do the singing."

"I wasn't planning on singing anything, Hiei. You know I can't sing."

"I know that. But I wasn't sure you did."

"It doesn't translate well as a song anyway. Even in prose it doesn't sound half as good as in the original. Some things just don't translate."

Yusuke was getting impatient. The demons could argue poetry over prose on their own time. "Well? You gonna tell the story or not?"

Kurama's attention had already shifted. "Not, it seems. Or at least not now. Remind me later. They're coming back."

In truth, the door opened again, and Koenma floated back in, Botan still in tow, though not literally this time.

"The spirit's coming back," Koenma said importantly.

"It hasn't been an hour yet," Kuwabara observed. "Doesn't that mean it's found something?"

Koenma seated himself behind his desk grumpily. "Apparently so." Even as he spoke, dark gray smoke, heavily streaked with black, began to condense in the general center of the room. And as it did so, Yusuke realized what had bothered him about sending a captured ghost.

_That could have been me… At least I'm alive to run their errands. At least I have a choice._

The smoke pulled itself together, resolving again as Jesse's ghost, still looking like he'd crawled off a shipwreck. However, there was now a difference. Instead of wearing his beaten brown jacket, that had doubtless seen better days even in life, he was carrying it like a sling between his two hands.

The miniature Lord of the Dead clapped his own two hands together sharply. "Jesse D'arkos, report!"

Jesse looked up at him, as much as he could be said to look at anything through that shock of hair, and dropped the jacket. Out of it spilled pamphlets, letters, computer printouts, a handful of tickets, and a binder or two. Somewhere in the avalanche, the ghost vanished, mission successfully fulfilled.

Yusuke snatched one of the quite substantial tickets, which had fluttered through the air slower than the rest of the mass. Turning it this way and that, he drew on his rudimentary knowledge of Western characters to read slowly, "S…an…Fr…an…s…iss…coh—San Francisco—hey, give that back!"

Koenma had snatched it out of his hands, monocle already in eye. "'San Francisco US Airport, Flight 73, second class'," he read, hovering out of Yusuke's reach. "'Disembarking at Gate Nine at 2:19 PM, April 2nd.' It's a plane ticket."

"I see that! Give it back."

Now that he'd read it, he had no further interest in it, so he dropped it, letting Yusuke scramble for it. "Anything else?"

"Plenty." Kurama had a map spread out on a free floor tile, kept in place with a notebook and a rock. "Looks like your ghost just raided someone's desk. And you accuse me of stealing."

Koenma scowled at him. "They don't do that. They make replicated copies of the essence of whatever they find so people don't wonder where everything went. The real versions of all these are wherever he found it. It's all rather complicated. What's the map of?" He took off again to look at it from a different perspective.

"College campus, from the look of it. There's scribbled notes everywhere. I can't read them."

"Schedule," Hiei added in his usual monosyllabic manner, somehow managing to make the two-syllable word seem like one. He squinted at it, before turning it upside down, which turned out to be right side up anyway. "Rikidyce International Biological Sciences…" Had he been anyone else, he would have added something along the lines of 'shit, can't they abbreviate?' at this point. As he wasn't, he kept on stubbornly, "…Media and Broadcast Annual Convention, San Francisco, California."

"Media and Broadcast." Botan seized on this specifically.

The little fire demon kept flipping through the schedule. Because it was unlikely that they would get an answer, no one thought to ask him where he'd learned to read English. "April twenty-fourth, Kobayashi-maru Sato, hosting in conference room ten…'Beyond the Missing Link: New Worlds of Evolution.'"

"That's him. That's it." Yusuke punched a fist into the air, missing Koenma purely by chance.

Somewhat affronted at the close call, the godling came back down to the ground. "Well, boys…looks like you have your target."

The whole room paused. Then there was a general outcry, mostly objections.

"What? Us?"

"Why us?"

"We don't spy! We _hit things_!" Kuwabara repeated.

"Koenma, sir, are you sure about this?"

And so on and so forth, most of which would eventually be settled by Koenma screaming at all and sundry until he turned blue, which was enough to shut most of them up anyway.

_(To Be Continued)_


	5. 1'4: Conference Call

**Country of the Blind**

**Chapter Four: Conference Call**

**Author's Note: **Remember Stephanie, Kobayashi-maru, and Persis from Chapter One? I told you they were going to show up later. Here they are again.

**ON WITH THE SHOW!**

**San Francisco, California, USA: April 9th**

Kobayashi-maru Sato was on top of the world, not quite literally. But he felt like he was. And with all the directing he was doing, he may as well might have been.

For the seventh time in the last four and a half hours, he looked up from his clipboard to survey the room, and ended up, again, dropping the board to leap to the rescue.

"No, _there_," he corrected. "Look, we're trying to recreate the site in miniature…oh, for crying out loud, just let me do it…"

Come to think of it, this was probably why it had taken four and a half hours to get even half of the room set up. He just couldn't resist getting his hands all over everything. Often it ended up with him getting in the way.

Several of his team, most if not all veterans from that first exhilarating discovery in Arizona, shot him dirty looks.

"Hey, boss, we know what we're doing!" Allie, one of his specialists, scolded him. "Get out of our way!"

Reluctantly, the eager archeologist stood back and watched, only breaking off his vigil when a new handful of people entered his personal auditorium, bearing between the lot of them a display case filled with genetic results from one of the fascinating skeletons they'd found out there. Beside the sheets of paper, incomprehensible to the large majority of people, were several pictures of the creature and short statements along the lines of _Although all species known to date exhibit four basic DNA bases, anomalies are freely evident in the genetic code of the 'Otherworlder'_.

'Yashi paused for a moment to beam at the large-as-life picture of that so-called 'Otherworlder'. With its curiously extended arms and huge eyes, the mostly-humanoid creature was a perfect blend of many UFO hoaxes. But he knew… he knew it wasn't. This was the genuine article, and it wasn't from outer space.

Surrounding it were photos, of phenomenal quality, of other specimens of similar makeup. Although the shapes and general designs of the creatures varied widely, part of his presentation centered on the links between them. Back in Arizona, they'd even captured a live creature that conformed to the tenuous norm and was not in any biology book they'd been able to track down. It had been quite an impressive specimen. He regretted that it could not be part of the press conference, but it had died shortly after escaping for a brief but tumultuous interval. Besides, he doubted he would have been permitted to bring a beast that had already killed two researchers into a room full of important scientists and reporters.

Leaning on the podium from which he would, in only a few days, reveal the truth about life on Earth as he knew it to the entire world, he imagined the slew of cameras and important scientists that would hear his revelation.

"'Yashi!"

Thrilled by his flight of imagination and the activity all around him, the man spun around, peering over the heads of a few people toward the source of the sound. He found it leaning on the doorframe at the back of the room.

He smiled widely and welcomingly. "Persis, my darling! How's the PR going?"

She frowned slightly under dull black bangs. "It is not. I—" The woman broke off and looked around uncomfortably. She didn't like to shout. Raising one hand, she beckoned him over.

With a parting smile and wave to his fantastical audience, he vaulted off the stage and made his way through the chairs to his fiancée's side, who hugged him thankfully.

'Yashi's eyebrows shot up. "I love you too, Persis; what's the grand occasion?" Persis didn't like to show too much affection—indeed, too much existence—in public, except when it was: (a) absolutely necessary, (b) on camera or stage, or (c) she was out of control with excitement. Heaven knew what she'd try to plan for their wedding, which would, in a sense, be (d) all of the above. However, for several years, she'd put off setting a date.

"I just wanted to talk to you."

He shrugged, careful not to hit her with his elbows. "Here I am. Talk away."

She let him go only to grab his sleeve. "I'm not comfortable with this," she hissed for his ears only.

"What? Is someone bothering you?"

Persis glared up at him. She was a few inches shorter than he was, but nothing drastic. "It's not _someone_, 'Yashi, and you know it. I don't feel right about all this."

"What, the conference? But we've been trying to get here for years!"

She sighed and dropped his jacket sleeve. Turning away, she strode out into the foyer. Concerned, 'Yashi followed her, and immediately felt somewhat guilty when she slumped to the floor, leaning against the wall, and buried her head in her hands, resting them on jean-covered legs.

"You don't get it, do you?" she said finally. "With all your theories and ideas, all your careful hypotheses—oh, fine, _our _ideas—you still can't see the potential consequences."

'Yashi was confused, and didn't mind admitting it. "No, I don't get it! What am I supposed to be getting here?" He sank to his knees in front of her and tried to look her in the eye. He failed. "What I 'get', love, is that we've devoted years of effort to this point. I see that we have a chance to better science as it stands right now, to better understand the way life, the universe itself works! We know we're right; what sort of consequences are you talking about?"

She shoved him away forcibly, her attack taking him by surprise. Suddenly sprawled on his back, on the floor, which was most embarrassing, he propped himself up on his heels and glared up at her, Persis having risen to her feet to stand over him.

"Yes," she said. "We're right. But what if we're missing something? Something…more?"

She clenched her fists, shifting her weight from foot to foot awkwardly. "I think we're meddling with something we don't have the power to take on. Sure, maybe the ones we found were probably just dumb beasts, but a handful of specimens don't make a species, 'Yashi! And we had to invent a whole new phylum just to categorize them! We just don't know enough. I think there's a good chance that if there is something more than an entirely new species of animals, like you've _theorized_, then we could be in big trouble."

"Trouble?" 'Yashi couldn't help repeating. "What, like with the plagiarism police? Sure, the guys who write those biology textbooks are going to be damn unhappy…"

This evidently was not the answer she was looking for. Furious, she stamped her foot down a little too close to his prone torso for comfort. "You think so _small_, Kobayashi-maru!" she howled, and strode away.

'Yashi managed to sit all the way up, staring after her retreating form, honestly quite dumbstruck.

It figured that this was the exact moment Stephanie Erinyes chose to enter the foyer, shedding rain all over the carpet. She caught the tail end of the argument, and she was the one who found appropriate words:

"What the hell?"

"You can say that again," 'Yashi said glumly. He reached up. "Give me a hand?"

She gave him the required lift without taking here eyes off the now-violently swinging door where Persis had vanished. "What just happened?"

'Yashi attempted to shrug it off. "Persis is just being paranoid."

"That didn't look like paranoid to me, 'Yashi," the journalist cautioned. "That looked like really mad. None of my business, to be sure, but I'd even call that scared."

He attempted a chuckle. "Stephanie, you're a journalist. Everything is your business. And as for Persis being scared—why, she's just worried about having to get up on that podium and give her part of the presentation to such an audience! Stage fright, that's all." It was the best excuse he could think of while simultaneously being absolutely flabbergasted: Persis did not get, and had never gotten, stage fright.

"True," she allowed. "But right now my business is this presentation. Have your crew gotten in my computers yet? This press release isn't going to be anything like as good without the graphics."

"I don't think so. But they may have by now."

"That's not very specific."

"This is a press conference, Stephanie," he said wryly. "Who's sure of anything?"

He got only a weird look. "I think I'll go check for myself," she said finally.

After a few seconds, she reappeared in the doorway, holding the door ajar before it swung back and crushed her entirely. It was a large door.

"Your speech, by the way, is in my car," she reminded him.

"_Stephanie,"_ he sighed, "I already have a copy—three of them! One in that briefcase at the stage—double-padlocked with locks large enough to see from here, you'll notice—not to mention one in my car, in a nice manila folder so I can read it _ad nauseum_ while I'm idling away in California traffic; and one in my hotel room so I can rehearse it there too! Persis can prompt me from memory! _I_ can prompt me from memory!"

"Good for you. Don't. But you can never have too many backup copies," she said firmly. "Remind me before I leave today."

Rolling his eyes, 'Yashi replied, "Yes, Stephanie," because there truly was no other way out.

That seemed to be satisfactory, for she closed the door again. 'Yashi waited for a few seconds, lest it reopen for her to find him scurrying away, before, well, scurrying away. He wanted to look at the banner outside the entrance.

Just seeing it made him happy. Stephanie had designed it, because she was in journalism and knew about such things. But it had his name on it—his! And the title of the speech, which Persis had thought up.

He tilted his head back to read "Beyond the Missing Link: New Worlds of Evolution" and the time beneath it. The other people moving in a preparatory manner through the convention center didn't give him a second glance.

With a mischievous grin, he pointed at it dramatically. "At three PM," he said, "on April twenty-fourth, the world will know the truth, and the truth—" He paused, trying to settle on an appropriate saying. "And the truth will set us free!" he finally concluded triumphantly.

That was fifteen days from now.

* * *

We could start every section of this story with 'There was an argument in progress,' because somehow, somewhere, there is always an argument in progress, or winding down, or building up. There is not, as of yet, a way to explain it without simply shrugging and saying 'People!' in a sufficiently exasperated voice.

So far, that would seem to sum it up rather nicely. It will do for now, and we will not start this section with 'There was an argument in progress'.

It goes without saying…

Yusuke had never really sat down and thought about it, but he was rather annoyed to realize that such a thought should have occurred to him before:

The Reikai was _rich_. And they seemed to be having a lot of fun laundering it, if the _jet_ they were looking at, from the unenviable position of the roof of the airport's ground control tower, was any indication.

First things first. They were, after all, several hundred feet in the air.

"Botan!" Yusuke yelled over the wind. "What the hell are you playing at?" He instinctively crouched down, rocking onto his heels and planting one hand on the metal roof for balance. He really didn't want to fall; he had a feeling that he wasn't going to get a third chance at life no matter how much Koenma wanted him working this case.

"Sorry!" she howled back, dropping her oar to clutch ineffectively at her kimono's long skirts. The oar vanished before it could hit anything or anyone, much less cause a very confused alert from any Ground Control staff who happened to be looking out the window. Stamping her foot in frustration, she snapped her fingers and her traditional robes flattened themselves to her body before melting into contemporary T-shirt and jeans.

Yusuke only gave about a millisecond to watching this.He was more concerned by little things like being in a most awkward place. A thought occurring to him, he glanced around the roof hurriedly. With his luck, Botan would have left the rest of his gang behind.

No such thing had happened. The other three were all there, if no more pleased than he was. Kuwabara was gaping around at the arrays of satellite dishes and antennae, along with other things no one was about to put a name to, keeping them all company. True to form, he reached out cautiously and 'pinged' it with a flick of the finger; the resulting noise, if any, was inaudible over the wind.

Kurama was curled into a ball at the base of one of the pylons, hands clapped over his ears and a grimace on his face. Seeing Yusuke's look in his direction, he flicked his own eyes at the antennae and flinched. _He can hear some of it, if not all,_ Yusuke realized. _Ouch is right!_

Hiei either couldn't hear as many frequencies or was hiding it better; chances were about even on that bet.

"Kuwabara, you lunkhead, don't mess with that!" Yusuke hollered at the other teen. "Bo_tan_, get us fricken' out of here!"

Looking rather frazzled, either by the yelling or the mess the wind was making of her hair, the ferry-girl yelled something back that was totally obscured by another blast. In frustration, she reached out her hands and beckoned impatiently.

Yusuke snatched the nearest hand and tried to kick Kuwabara to get his attention. It was unnecessary; the other boy had abandoned his curiosity and snatched her other hand. Neither had time to blink before the demons joined them, upon which Botan instantly made them all vanish without a trace. The troublesome wind rushed in to fill the void created impatiently, producing a sudden eddy that baffled the radar for a few seconds before being quite forgotten.

To Botan's credit, she managed to rematerialize them in an empty passenger's lounge. It was rather an impressive lounge, too, emitting an aura of waiting for a VIP of the highest caliber to come along. The walls were lined with plush chairs of various shapes, designs, and sizes, except against the outer wall, which was taken up almost entirely by a panoramic window offering an incredible view of the airport's tangle of runways, almost dizzying in its complexity. Unfortunately no one had gotten around to cleaning that single huge pane of glass recently, and various spattered bugs dotted the expanse.

Aside from that, it was very nice. Looking down to make sure he wasn't still outside, as he'd rematerialized facing out that huge window, Yusuke stamped his feet appreciatively in the thick carpet, unfortunately leaving grubby footprints in it. His boots just acquired dirt; he didn't know or care why. The walls were wood-paneled, and there was a TV set into the far wall. He expected to hear soothing music any second now, but was disappointed.

"Oh! Fridge!" Kuwabara cried, dropping Botan's hand like a hot rock in favor of the refrigerator just as tastefully hidden behind the inevitable large tree, which is a standard of waiting rooms everywhere and was quite probably artificial. But it managed to look rather real regardless.

Only after a quick dispute stemming from both teens grabbing the same Coca-Cola can at the same time, and neither willing to back down, that was resolved without too many threats, did they realize that this might have been a mistake too. A better mistake, granted, but neither wanted to risk it again.

"Uh, so is this where we were supposed to end up, Botan?" Kuwabara asked, leaning on the fridge door. "'Cause, this is good."

Botan flashed him a thumbs-up and a grin. "We're good!" She plucked a small red device off one of the three coffee tables placed throughout the room. Waving it in their direction, she added, "Koenma put this here earlier; it's a homing beacon. I—ah hah—am not very accurate around too much human technology. It's the aura." She squinted at the device. "It's not supposed to be doing this…I think."

"It's the radio waves," Kurama complained. Sprawled in one of the leather-covered armchairs, he kept one hand over his forehead in the manner of one with a headache while extending the other one in the vague direction of the boys. "Coke?"

"Yep, sure. Catch!" Yusuke lobbed a can in his direction, only belatedly realizing that such an action might not have been such a good idea.

Luckily for him, the fox caught it, opening it with some relief. "Mmm…add this to the list of things the Demon World hasn't invented yet."

"No wonder demons are always at war," Kuwabara sighed.

"Coke deficiency is _not_ the reason for that, Kuwabara. I was saying—radio waves that concentrated and that strong can wreak havoc with balance and orientation. Not to mention, it hurts my ears."

"You can hear that?"

"Yes, and it hurts like all hell. You have no idea what rock concerts sound like to me, and you really don't want to find out."

"That would do it," Botan sighed. "This shouldn't have let us go that far off track, though…" She poked at it ineffectively. It zapped her. "Ouch! It's broken. Or breaking."

"Hey, look on the bright side," Yusuke pointed out. "We didn't end up in the middle of the ocean." On this cheery note, he and his soda went over to the window, joining Hiei, who had been keeping track of the conversation without joining in as usual. "Wow. You said there was a jet. Can we see it from here?"

"And if it's not, I'm going to break it myself…" Botan trailed off and looked up from her fiddling. "Should. Let me see." Surveying the airfield, she pointed out a medium-size jet that was some distance from the airport itself. "Not quite prepped yet, it looks like."

"So you guys own that jet? Outright?"

"Right! Under the guise of a human company, of course."

"Wicked cool," Yusuke drawled. He'd heard the expression on TV, and liked it quite a lot. "You guys must be loaded, I never thought about it before."

"Well of course!" Botan slapped him playfully. "Even without the Reikai treasure vaults—"

"There really is quite a lot of treasure in there, you know…" Kurama put in, evidently recovered enough to crack jokes.

"Shut up, you," Yusuke shot back at him with a grin.

Botan grinned, enjoying the reaction, and went on with her lecture. She would take any excuse to chat. "We've actually had quite a lot of fun messing with the stock markets of the world. It's not like we're going to be affected by a loss or anything, so it's mostly playing. But everyone likes to win, of course. I think the Reikai, all told, owns substantial shares in pretty much every major company in the world—and plenty of smaller ones, of course. It's turned into a bit of a game."

Yusuke was impressed despite himself. He wasn't an expert in the stock market, but then again, he was fifteen. He knew the sound of lots of money when he heard it. "That's one hell of a game! How do you keep track!"

"Same way anyone keeps track, silly! For points! There's a ledger somewhere in the Palace, of course."

"Who keeps track of that?"

"Um…I don't know. Maybe no one at the moment, they tend to go crazy with all the juggling." She glanced over her shoulder, gaze skipping from Hiei at the window to Kurama listening from his chair, with a distinctly mischievous grin. "Maybe we can borrow you two from time to time."

Yusuke had never heard such a crazy idea, and that was including all the dumb stuff he and Kuwabara had come up with over the years. "Are you crazy, Botan?! It'd take them about five seconds to nick the whole kit and caboodle!"

"So what? Everyone we've got steals. Or tries. Taking it is easy. Hiding it is what's hard."

"I think that's a _very_ bad idea. I can't think of _words_ to describe the utter badness of that idea. Don't. Just take my word for it."

"It's not like the money matters or anything…"

Now that was a concept quite foreign to Yusuke. With a single mom and a continuing struggle to make ends meet, he couldn't quite look at the sheer amount of cash she was talking about as not mattering.

"So it's basically a game?" That was almost disgusting.

Botan didn't see it quite the same way. She wasn't human, after all. She didn't have to worry about such mundane stuff as making a living; she had job security and a way of life until she annoyed Koenma too much. With a shrug, she continued, "There're rules and all, but it's not Reikai playing against Reikai. It's keeping the humans unawares while earning as much human money as we can. All so when we do work in the human world, we can travel in style!"

Yusuke was temporarily encouraged to overlook her callous attitude. That was a lead-in he could use. "Cool…does that extend to your agents, too?"

She was on to him. "Don't get too greedy, Yusuke. But yes, you're taking that jet."

Kuwabara finished off his drink and abandoned it to the nearest table, stifling a burp. Ah, caffeine and carbonation.

"Well, that sounds like a heck of a great deal for you. Great. But I've just got one little question."

"What is it, Kuwabara?"

"With all that…how come we don't get paid?"

No one had yet been able to figure out why they weren't. They did, after all, risk life and limb on a pretty regular basis playing pest control and cops for someone with quite a lot of money. Admittedly they did tend to overlook that two of them were still convicted criminals and one had been quite literally given his life back.

"Uh…Good question!! You can ask Koenma next time you see him!"

Everyone recognized a classic Botan avoidance tactic when they heard it, but no one insisted.

A sharp tapping noise caught their ears. Hiei had rapped on the window in an attempt to get their attention without actually having to say anything. Having achieved that, he pointed at a cardboard box incongruously under one of the couches. "That looks important," he said.

"Um, it's a cardboard box," Kuwabara pointed out.

"In here?" A simple nod referred to the opulence of the rest of the room.

"He's got a point, Kuwabara. And what's more, I don't think it was here two minutes ago." Yusuke reached underneath the sofa and pulled it out. Before anyone could stop him, he shook it roughly. Inside, something rattled.

"Yusuke!" Botan yelped. "That could be breakable!"

"I doubt it. You guys build stuff pretty well. Except for communicators."

"Which is probably what that is!"

"Oops." He opened the box and peered in. "Yep. But it's not broken. Yet."

Botan took it away from him, leaning over his shoulder and snatching it. "This looks new. I hope not. Too-new things tend to not have all the problems solved yet. They usually explode, and that _will_ bring the security systems here down on us. We've dodged the majority of Customs and Security, but we still need to be careful." She set it down on the nearest table and, covering her eyes with one hand, prodded it gingerly with one finger before jumping back.

It did not explode, and the fire alarm did not go off. Instead, it fritzed to itself for a few seconds before lighting up and casting light on the wall like an ordinary projector.

They were patient and waited, and nothing happened.

Just before someone, anyone, jumped up and condemned it as junk, the light ran through the spectrum and resolved into the image of a very familiar person.

On the wall, Koenma leaned forward and tapped at an invisible glass pane. "Excellent," he squeaked. "I like this one. Hi, guys. I can see you."

"Is this live?" Kuwabara whispered to Botan.

Koenma heard. "Yes it is! And I'm very busy, so let's get to the point." Folding his hands in front of him on an invisible desk, he hemmed and hawed for a second, shuffling invisible papers. Koenma almost never got straight to the point. While he stalled, Kuwabara switched off the lights so they could see better.

Finally, he said, "I'm only going to say this once, Yusuke, but you-were-right." It sounded like it hurt him to say that. "You lot aren't spies. I knew that. I don't want the information they've got back here. I want it destroyed."

"Now that," Yusuke answered him, "sounds right up our alley. Go in, break things, and then get out fast. Did I miss anything?"

The demigod sighed. "Basically. Do you want the rest of the information I have or not?"

"Yes, we do. The more we know the better," Kurama chipped in before Yusuke could try to say something smart.

With a bit of a huff, Koenma went on, "I went back through the files—actually, I got quite a lot of ogres to go through the files—and found out that someone has been sending me bulletins on that exact archaeological expedition. It's from one of our anonymous spies, so it was mostly ignored. But, as they know so much about it, I figure they're part of this Sato's team. That narrows it down quite a lot. If you can figure out who this 'Delta' contact is, he or she will probably be able to help you. Delta's help will be _invaluable_. Otherwise you'll just be floundering around in the dark."

"You don't know _anything_ about this person?" Kurama wanted to know. "Human, demon, male, female? Nothing at all?"

Koenma shrugged. "They speak English. And well. We've looked at all the reports, and there aren't any demonic colloquialisms—"

"What?" Yusuke and Kuwabara said in relative unison.

"There are certain phrases unique to the principal demonic language," Kurama told them in an aside. "A demon out of practice in Japanese or English or whatever has a certain pattern to its speech. You probably wouldn't notice it, but we'll recognize it."

"If 'Delta' is a demon, the fox and I can probably sense or smell it," Hiei said flatly.

"In a college campus full of humans? And there probably will be other demons there. The barrier isn't perfect, as you well know. There may even be descendents of the original refugee families there, although I believe most of those have died out or interbred," Koenma commented.

Yusuke wasn't entirely sure what that meant, but he got the general idea—demons probably all over the place. For some reason, certain types of demons gravitated to humans, whether out of a desire for food or attention; it varied. Some fed off or enjoyed the constant hum of power and activity in any major human city. "Got it," he said casually. "Do we have any kind of cover story?"

Koenma looked slightly put out at being preempted, but he was more pleased. "Well done, Yusuke, you're thinking like a real detective."

"Whaddya mean, a _real_ detective?"

Wisely, the demigod chose not to answer that, knowing conversational bait when he heard it. "You're in California on vacation. If anyone asks you for permission to get into anywhere, there are four cards on the plane. They look blank, but that's because you don't expect to see anything there. _They_ will, so it'll look like an ID card, or whatever. It works by hypnosis—basically."

"Neat," Kuwabara approved. "Very _Star Wars_."

Yusuke kicked him before the taller boy could start some sort of lousy Jedi imitation. "That's it?" he directed at Koenma's image.

Koenma threw up his hands, one of them clenched as if he was holding a file of some kind. "That's _mostly_ it."

"Wait a second." Kuwabara held up one finger. "I don't speak English. Urameshi doesn't speak English." He paused, looking suspiciously at Kurama and Hiei. "I'm not even going to hazard a guess about those two," he continued finally. "I'm usually wrong. They change just to prove me wrong. But we still don't speak English. That's going to be one hell of a hurdle."

Now given another opportunity to show off, the demigod projected onto the wall clapped his hands triumphantly. "Not to worry, for I in my brilliance have come up with a solution! _Also_ on that plane is a GADGET that can, for a short while, imprint upon the language part of your brain whatever language we program into it!"

"You didn't come up with that," Botan contradicted. "One of your techies did. Probably the one that got blown up last week, come to think of it."

"Oh, that so does not inspire confidence in those things," Yusuke groaned.

"Botan!" Koenma squalled. "I'm trying to be impressive here, and you're undercutting me!"

It was really hard to be impressive in the body of a toddler, especially including the pacifier and the temper tantrum in the works. Botan ignored him. "Don't worry, Yusuke, the explosion wasn't his fault."

Koenma was still mumbling under his breath, sulking, when Yusuke tried to get his attention. "Oi! Toddler!"

That was ordinarily good for another few minutes of argument, but for the moment Koenma let it slide. "What now?"

Yusuke grinned. It was rather a scary grin. It had definite menacing purpose behind it. It was a Wide Smile With Intent.

"What?" Koenma asked rather nervously.

"We're going to be actually functioning among _humans_. We've got to look normal."

"Right until all hell breaks loose."

"That had better be your usual sarcasm and not a prediction, short-stuff. So, back to 'normal'…normal people at any and all conventions have _money_. Botan here just finished blabbing about your fortune. So shell out."

"I swear I'm going to glue your mouth shut this time, Botan!" Koenma snapped at her. She shrugged, but sunk a little deeper into her chair. The Prince of the Dead looked back at Yusuke, who was still wearing that Wide Smile. After shifting back and forth for a few seconds, he tried to bargain. "A credit card. With limits. And I want receipts."

"Two," Kurama interrupted. This was his territory. "We'll have to split up at some time. Two functioning teams are a much better idea than one group stuck together by a need for money."

Koenma squinted at him through the transmission, trying to find something wrong with that. "I still want receipts," he warned.

"Done."

"Fine!" Koenma turned away from the screen for a second to scribble an order on an invisible sheet and hand it to someone equally invisible.

Yusuke grinned and snapped his fingers. "All right. Money and language, those were my main problems. Oh, right, and how are we supposed to get back?"

"Well, you can't have Botan. I need her here."

"I feel so wanted."

"Just…" Koenma waved his hand distractedly. "Think of something. The jet won't go anywhere, we have more—"

"We have more, the guy says," Kuwabara muttered.

"—and the pilot won't leave without my say-so or yours. Happy now?"

"I don't know." Yusuke turned to the rest of his crew. "Anything more you think we should ask, gang?"

For a few seconds, everyone looked at everyone else. This 'preparing for things in advance' strategy was relatively new to them: the Reikai Tantei ought to have patented flying by the seat of their pants. Koenma's usual idea of preparation was pointing them in the right general direction and telling them what to hit. Everything else was basically window dressing that would be handled about two seconds before it hit them.

When it became apparent that he wasn't going to get an answer, Koenma bid them farewell with a cheerful last warning: "Oh, and if you get yourselves arrested, I'm not bailing you out."

For various reasons, this managed to completely offend everyone all in one go. A new record!

The demigod turned to Botan. "Get them on the plane, and then get back here as fast as you can. We're starting a full-scale investigation. Nothing like this is ever an isolated incident."

Botan saluted mock-wearily. "Yes, sir."

The light from the projector died away, leaving an empty wall and a winding-down device behind. Botan stood up and stretched as Kuwabara flicked on the lights. "Right," she said, "sounds like we better get on with it. At least he'll be doing some backup research. If we get any more information, we'll call."

"All right, let's go check out that jet!" Kuwabara said enthusiastically, grabbing a second soda can for the road and leading the way to the door. The rest of the group trooped out behind him until Botan shoved her way to the front. By chance, this happened at exactly the same time he realized he didn't have the faintest idea where he was going.

"Now, I've got a challenge for you lot," Botan said over her shoulder as they made their way down the stairs.

"Oh yeah? Bring it on!" Yusuke managed to match Kuwabara for enthusiasm.

"Just once, let's try to go that short distance _without_ some sort of incident, argument, disagreement, disaster, or in fact anything that would call unnecessary attention to us!"

* * *

As a matter of fact, they did manage to make their way over to the privately-owned craft terminal area without any kind of incident. This was, after all, a major airport, and the staff and visitors saw far stranger people every day.

Well, from their point of view, that is, although there were without a doubt a few demons scattered through the normal throngs of vacationers, traveling business people, and characters just hanging out.

In any event, by the time they bid Botan farewell at the gate, nothing unusual had happened and they hadn't gotten yelled at, which was also quite unusual. The various security guards, thick on the ground everywhere else, seemed in short supply. Yusuke wasn't sure whether he should put that down to the Spirit World running interference, or just dumb luck. He decided to give the credit to dumb luck, just because.

Down the short passage and onto the plane, they gave the jet a once-over, and then a second look. It was much nicer than your average commercial airline, or even an above-average airline.

"Nice," Yusuke commented approvingly. "We should get sent to America more often."

If the windows were closed and it hadn't been narrower than a typical room, it could have easily been mistaken for the inside of a middle-class country club. There were a handful of plush white chairs that held serious potential as recliners, two tables, and pair of TVs on either side of the passage that doubtless led to lavatory accommodations and the cockpit, in the extreme likelihood that this jet was arranged like a regular airplane.

Tiny lights that could be turned on and off with the touch of a finger lined the junction between wall and ceiling. There was a nice white carpet on the floor. Of course, something like this would never be so crude as to have luggage racks by the ceiling. It wasn't readily apparent, and it was only later that they found out that bags and baggage (and indeed, other things) could be easily stored in the hollow blocks that functioned as both cabinets and tables while still looking as elegant as a box could ever hope to look.

Not only that, the four of them had the run of the place. This was an exclusive flight. The only other people on board were the pilot and copilot, whom we are about one paragraph away from meeting.

"I like it. I definitely approve." Yusuke planted himself in the nearest chair and leaned back experimentally. "Nope, it's not a recliner. Too bad."

Hiei looked at it once and punched one of the buttons on the armrest without telling him. The back of the seat flipped backwards, taking Yusuke unawares. "Whoa!" Since he had now discovered it was indeed a reclining chair, he forgave Hiei for surprising him. "Don't do that again," he merely said.

"Hey, guys!" a new voice greeted them before they could get too creative with various controls. "At the risk of sounding clichéd, I'm the pilot today. My name's Sachi."

Sachi was tall and rather spare. She was wearing a blue and booted human airline pilot's uniform that didn't fit her very well and had the air of a costume. No doubt when interacting with humans she affected a more normal guise, but at the moment she had a ridge of feathers spiking up like a bird's crest across the crown of her head. Her eyes were set slightly wider than a human, so as she turned her head to scan them it became apparent that the crest continued down her spine.

As nominal leader, Yusuke introduced them all, abstaining from the normal sniping that classically accompanied such an act.

"Nice to meet you all," she said once he'd finished doing that. "And this is Chiara." A perfectly identical figure joined her in the doorway. "We're twins," Sachi added.

"Hi, all," Chiara said. Her voice was identical to her sister's. "Sorry I can't stay. Busy." Ducking back down the corridor, she vanished from sight.

"She's getting the jet ready to launch and dealing with the airport people," Sachi explained. "Meanwhile I'm helping you guys. Look here for a second."

They gave her their attention as she opened one of the drawers in a cabinet. She drew out four sets of headphones, each attached to a small, flat square.

"These are the translator GADGETs," she said. "Master Koenma said none of you spoke English, so that's what they're programmed for. Run into any other language over there, you're on your own."

"And we just listen to them?" Kuwabara asked. "I've seen human versions of things like that. They don't work."

"Ah, but these are Reikai versions. They work. They'll also," she added, "knock you out for most of the trip. That's how the information is imprinted on your subconscious. To get all of it, you'll only be able to be awake for about an hour."

"Oh. I see." Another lie for the list.

"Should prevent you from getting too jet-lagged, too," she added cheerfully. "See you in California."

Sachi, too, returned to the cockpit, leaving the four of the Reikai Tantei staring at the devices or the closed door.

"That seems simple enough," Kuwabara admitted. A thought occurred to him. It spread over his face in the form of a huge smile. "Hey…y'know what, Urameshi?"

"What?"

"This is going to make language classes at school a breeze."

"Hey…" Yusuke said in an identical tone. "Awesome!" The two humans slapped hands.

"So do either of you speak English?" Yusuke asked the other two curiously.

"Not very well," Kurama replied, inspecting one of the units with interest. "Just what's taught at school, really."

"No."

"All right, then, here, catch!"

The redhead accepted one, but Hiei folded his hands into his sleeves. "I'm not letting that brat mess with my mind. I'll pick it up from the first native speaker we meet."

Yusuke gave him a skeptical look but decided wisely to let him make his own mistakes.

At that moment, a transmission came in from the cockpit. _"All right, guys, we're about to take off! Why don't you sit down just for the look of the thing?"_

Everyone chose a chair for themselves, all near the windows. None of them had been on a plane before, except for Yusuke and Kuwabara during an elementary school field trip that had ended in mild disaster. It hadn't, for the record, been of their doing.

* * *

In the seven hours it took the Reikai jet to get from Japan to California, many things happened all over the worlds. Some of them were, of course, arguments. A few of them are relevant.

In San Francisco, Delta sent a new report to the Reikai. It was picked up faster than any of Delta's reports had ever been picked up before and instantly brought to the attention of Koenma, who read it avidly but could extract no further useful information than that which he already had.

Also in San Francisco, a rumor spread through the demonic underworld about a man who wanted to talk about demons to the world. It was mostly ignored. Plenty of people talked about demons. There were magazines about demons. They were called 'tabloids' and demons had great fun messing with them.

In London, an elderly but active man booked a flight to San Francisco, and got into an argument with a variety of people about his luggage.

Persis worked off her frustration with a ten-mile run through the city, and came back more willing to help.

The conference center found itself over-booked by last-minute arrivals.

In Washington, D.C., a report similar to one that had just landed on Koenma's desk landed on the desk of a general, who read it with some concern and started to make phone calls.

In Rome, someone read a science magazine with a list of upcoming conferences and the subjects to be discussed therein.

Kobayashi-maru Sato rehearsed his speech letter-perfect to a listening Persis.

Dominic Massey, famous astrophysicist, orchestrated _his_ discussion of the triune nature of the universe in conference room six and started to develop a hypothesis of triune natures of life that fit with the original theory.

In conference room ten, someone snuck in and removed a rather important component of the upcoming press release…

_(To Be Continued)_

* * *

**Author's Notes, Part One:** I know nothing about jets. So I snitched one off the Internet; if you search 'private jet interior' on Google, it's the second from the left on the second row of results. Or it was… You may have noticed that I capitalized gadget; that's because GADGET extrapolates to Gratuitously Added Dimly Glowing Electronic Thing. Seriously.

**Author's Notes, Part Two:** I refuse to beg for reviews. I'm not going to grovel, and I am going to write this whether or not you like it, because I really, really want to write it. That's all the motivation I need. Now, I'm not going to barrel along railroad tracks with no concern for my readers, so I would be glad of feedback. Feedback is good, positive feedback is better, constructive criticism is fantastic (and aren't we all fans here?). But I'm not going to grovel. Good night (or whatever), see you next chapter hopefully. Thank you for reading.


	6. 1'5: A Collusion of Worlds

**Chapter Five: A Collusion of Worlds**

**Author's Notes: **I don't deal in reality; reality's no fun. Therefore any flaws or errors inherent in this story are solely a product of a discrepancy between your universe and mine and are, by that logic, not my fault, or, in fact, mistakes at all.

**Disclaimer: **I continue to NOT own, specifically: asteroids, _Yu Yu Hakusho_, a jet, a convention center, or, indeed, San Francisco. And no, I don't live there. It's a cross between a Star Trek joke and a coincidence. Anyone who gets it is either Reading My Mind, or a fan.

**ON WITH THE SHOW!**

_**San Francisco, California, USA: April 18**_

The convention proper had begun four days ago, and Yusuke had used his all-purpose pass to great effect during those last few days. In the five days between their arrival in San Francisco and the official opening of the convention doors, he and his gang had spent their time exploring the city and attempting to at once stay out of trouble and find out all they could, which had, to date, resulted in a total of being kicked out of places seven times, collectively; getting lost three times in the convention center and twice in the city, all told; four instances of 'what does _this_ button do?', none of which caused any lasting harm; a steadily growing stack of receipts to all manner of places; and gratuitous messing with the minds of various room service people.

But so far, he had met with no great success with regard to their assignment. Admittedly, he was not really cut out for this type of work. He had tried the easiest strategy he could think of, which was walking through all the doors he could find and looking for suspicious demonic-looking…well, anything.

That hadn't worked out. First off, the door to conference room ten was, with the opening of the convention proper, almost always locked, like all the other rooms that contained exhibits that had not yet been presented. When it was unlocked, he'd found out through creative uses of loitering, it was in use. People kept coming in and out, and only rarely were they carrying things.

"Well, this is damn stupid," he'd said after three hours of doing nothing beyond keeping the door in view. "They probably have a back door anyway."

That figured, he thought. That…just…figured.

He'd stomped up back to the hotel rooms they'd retained and flopped onto 'his' bed. The room was empty of other people, but rather full of stuff: some clothes, both Yusuke's and Kuwabara's, since being teenagers, neither was inclined to pick things up; and a handful of newspapers they'd gone out and bought in hope of seeing, perhaps, an ad from the mysterious spy and contact 'Delta' saying, find me here, or anything that would indicate demons causing trouble that they could go out and beat up on—force of habit.

Added to this were the sundry other items that accumulate in any hotel room anywhere; a half-eaten muffin and Styrofoam cup that had held coffee at one point, several pouches of sugar nominally for said coffee, three plastic shopping bags, a washcloth neither was willing to lay claim to, and, inexplicably, the blinds.

Actually, it wasn't quite as much inexplicable as inevitable. That had been one of the experimental button-pressing incidents.

Yusuke stared at the ceiling for a little while, watching the fan blades go around, before pulling himself to his feet.

"Where was I?" he asked himself. "Oh yes. This is dumb. There is a grand tradition of Great Detectives. _I_ do not belong to it!"

He stepped over the washcloth and hammered on the connecting door. He'd leave the sneaking to the people who'd made a career out of it.

One might wonder, of course, why Yusuke hadn't gotten the two demons to do the undercover stuff in the first place.

The answer was relatively simple: Kurama had grinned that evil grin that suggested that he was really, _really_ enjoying watching you squirm, and had told Yusuke that this was his mission, he'd better get on with it, and Room Ten was downstairs, wasn't it? He obviously intended to do nothing at all unless it was absolutely unavoidable.

Yusuke thought that this was some peculiar form of revenge for specifically forbidding Kurama to steal anything. He didn't believe for a second that this would stop the fox, who stole things fairly compulsively, but he hoped it would deter him from trying to walk off with the Golden Gate Bridge or something else equally valuable. If he just stuck to casual pick-pocketing the entire time they were there…Yusuke could live with that.

Hiei had shot him a typical _you're-_really_-stupid-today-even-for-YOU_ look, and Yusuke hadn't asked again.

There was no answer from the other room. When he put his ear to the door, there was no sound in evidence at all. The ceiling fan wasn't running and the TV wasn't on.

He tried the door. It was locked, and there was no buzz of demonic _youki_ from the other room. Yusuke threw his hands into the air and headed back down the dormitory hallways.

For the next half hour, he wandered around looking for anyone he knew or anything that looked interesting. Buying a bag of roasted peanuts at random, and munching on it contentedly, he found one of the mounted programs and scanned it.

After a few seconds' reading, still enjoying the ability to fluently read a language he knew only a few words of a week ago, he tossed his empty bag in the nearest trashcan and followed a cavalcade of photography equipment, which was trundling through the hall on a fleet of gurneys, to one of the upstairs conference rooms, where, according to the schedule, someone was supposed to present a lecture on an asteroid he vaguely remembered reading something about while helping to haul science magazines around back in Japan. It sounded interesting enough to distract him.

Yusuke sauntered over to the escalator, disdaining the elevator now crammed full of the trolleys he'd been following in favor of the roomier atmosphere of the moving stairs. At the top, he was very surprised to be hailed by someone he didn't know.

"Excuse me!" a man's voice said, and Yusuke didn't take any notice until someone grabbed the sleeve of the baggy t-shirt he'd taken a fancy to a few days ago. "Young man!"

He had a slight accent that vaguely reminded Yusuke of Botan, and a similar smile. That in itself made Yusuke slightly nervous.

Not for the first time, he wished he had as accurate a sixth sense as Kuwabara. Over the course of the last week, he'd grown accustomed to scanning everyone he ran into for _youki_.

He'd given up with a headache, for there was a perpetual haze of demonic aura hovering over the entire area. Whether this was attributable to a higher concentration of demons, normal or not, or the demonic artifacts he knew were just behind that door into conference room ten, or if the entire campus had been built over or near a fault in the barrier, he couldn't say. He only knew he was actually better off than Kuwabara, who'd stayed in their dorm room for almost two days with a truly killer headache and a lot of aspirin. Only recently had his rival-cum-right hand managed to leave their dorm without melting into a screaming puddle of migraine.

"What's up?" the youth replied, somewhat wrong-footed but remembering in time not to add a reflexive 'gramps', which would have been considered impolite in San Francisco, USA. "You, um, looking for someone?"

The elderly man smiled at him. "Indeed so. Would you happen to know one Kobayashi-maru Sato, whom I believe is attending at this conference?"

Yusuke's mouth outran his mind. "You and me both, gramps. I've been looking for him for days. Y' wouldn't think one man would be so damn hard to find."

He shrugged. "It's too bad. I'd hoped to see him before his presentation. Are you planning on attending?"

"Huh? Me? Oh, yeah. Looks…interesting." Some sense of cunning led him to add, "Bit far-fetched, though."

The other raised one eyebrow. "Indeed. I'm Tyrone Raimund, by the way." He stuck out his hand, and Yusuke shook it.

"Urameshi Yu—um, that is, Yusuke Urameshi," he corrected himself. "Stupid backwards language," he added under his breath.

If Raimund heard, he didn't mention it. "Pleased to meet you, Yusuke. Should you see Mr. Sato, please do mention my name. I would like to see him very much."

"Sure, can do."

"Thank you. If you'll excuse me?" Raimund tipped an imaginary hat jokingly and left Yusuke standing, somewhat befuddled, by the escalators, wondering what had just happened, why it had happened to him, and what the hell the geezer wanted with Kobayashi-maru Sato.

* * *

Tyrone Raimund had come to San Francisco with many expectations, and some of the more definite ones included that he was going to have to run interference, too many people were going to be riding a catastrophe curve, and someone was going to get shot, attacked, or otherwise hurt.

He rather expected it wouldn't be him, and if he had to be involved, would rather be the one doing the attacking. He expected to be able to find Kobayashi-maru Sato fairly quickly, and either talk some sense into him, or find out who was pulling the stupidly reckless man's strings.

He did not expect it to be so damn hard to find him in order to have this little talk. Someone was hiding the man very well. As a keynote speaker at this conference, he should have been much in appearance, showing off for the cameras and the microphones that sprouted like weeds at any event with more than one hundred people. But instead, he was nowhere to be found. And Tyrone Raimund did not like this. He was slightly worried.

Peeking back over his shoulder, he watched the Japanese youth swagger off, and frowned, rubbing at his left ear.

"Odd," Raimund muttered. "Definitely human…I think. But odd. This is getting outrageous."

The buzzing sound that indicated something supernatural near him lessened as the boy put some distance between them. During their brief interchange, it had been almost deafening. Raimund had been hearing this sound, in various degrees, the entire time he'd been in San Francisco. But in the conference center, it had only intensified. Something was going on here. And he intended to find out what it was and who was behind it.

One floor up, a shape leaned over the balcony, staring just to the left of the musing man. The creature up there wasn't stupid. It knew that if you stared at a hunter for too long, you'd end up being prey. And the creature, like most demons, actually did want to live but wasn't very good at furthering that end.

It pulled the bandana a little tighter around its serrated ears and shifted its gaze again, scanning the area all around. When it was certain that it had all the information it needed, it shuffled away from the edge to report back to its master, frequently casting glances over deeply slanted shoulders. It had been warned about what kind of a person it was spying on.

Below, Raimund rolled his shoulders. The space between his shoulder blades itched, as if he was being watched. But when he looked around, he saw no one, and the constant buzzing had gotten no louder than usual.

He made a mental note to keep an eye out for that boy. Anyone radiating that much presence was a magnet for trouble of a supernatural nature.

* * *

At that moment, 'that boy' wasn't in any trouble, although he was soon to be part of some. Yusuke had met up with Kuwabara quite by chance, and, after complaining about the querulous man he'd just met, forgot all about the asteroid presentation he'd planned on going to and occupied himself instead by deciding that there had to be a secret passage in a building this size. He had then enlisted Kuwabara and some maps of the building to help find it.

Kuwabara thought it was a stupid idea, and so wasn't being very helpful. Instead he was lounging around against various walls, padding along at Yusuke's heels.

You see, Kuwabara wanted to go home. He still had the remnants of a headache that wouldn't go away, and everyone and everything in the convention center gave him a bad feeling, as if something was going to explode any second now.

"Urameshi," he complained, tugging at Yusuke's sleeve, "this is stupid. Why don't we just go knock on the door, and when they open it, walk in?"

"Yeah right, idiot," Yusuke snapped back. "Like they're just gonna let us in because we ask."

"It works sometimes."

"On stupid demons!" the other pointed out. He didn't bother to keep his voice down. "These people are actual intelligent humans, y'know!"

"Humans with street smarts, them I'd worry about. But these are scientists! What do they know about things like that?"

Personally, Yusuke was fed up with this. His wild theory about secret passages had, so far, yielded a janitor's closet, an air conditioning unit, three exhaust pipes, two sets of staircases, a dumbwaiter, a closet filled with foldable chairs, and an intercom system. Not to mention a fire escape, which had started shrilling frantically when he opened it, convinced there was something suspicious behind it.

The alarms had stopped whooping half an hour ago, though, so he assumed someone else had sorted it out.

So he turned on Kuwabara and shouted, "Fine! You go _knock_ on the door! And when they arrest you for trespassing or spying or something, don't come running to me!" He ignored the logical contradiction in this statement.

Kuwabara thought about retaliating, but just then saw the look on Yusuke's face. He decided that it would be a better idea to let Yusuke calm down on his own.

"Fine," he snorted. "Dumbass," he added over his shoulder as he walked away.

Yusuke didn't have anything to throw at him, so he ignored the insult, glaring at the wall as if it was somehow to blame. "This is insane," he told it. "At this rate, the sun's gonna explode before we figure anything out. Where are those two demons anyway?" he added as an afterthought. He hadn't seen Kurama for almost four days. Hiei he hadn't seen since yesterday morning, which was more worrying, as contradictory as that may seem. Kurama could be depended on to behave among a large group of humans, whereas the littler demon saw a crowd of humans as potential firewood.

"_They_ better not have gotten themselves arrested," he muttered, despite knowing that it would have to be, literally, one hell of a jail to hold those two for more than five seconds. Maybe a little longer if the station had chocolate donuts to hand.

* * *

Still annoyed by Yusuke's attitude, Kuwabara headed downstairs. He'd show him! Stupid punk was always making things difficult, in Kuwabara Kazuma's much-vaunted opinion. The easiest answers, he'd always found, were the simplest.

He counted the doors until he found Conference Room Ten. Standing just around the corner, he looked past the junction for anyone who looked like they were supposed to be there. The only person in sight was a dark-haired woman standing against the wide window set in the far wall, and she was on a cell phone and paying no attention to anything except whoever she was talking to.

Kuwabara was about to go and knock, but another man beat him to it. He was an elderly man, wearing a tweed jacket and smartly shined black boots, and he walked with a slight limp.

_Sato?_ Kuwabara wondered. _Nah._ He'd seen a picture of Kobayashi-maru Sato in one of those endless magazines they'd hauled about earlier, and Sato was a much younger man.

The old man rapped on the door and waited patiently. Nothing happened within, but the woman on the cell phone looked up and noticed him. Snapping it closed with a click, she strode over to him and took him by the shoulder.

"Sorry, sir, but Room Ten is off-limits at the moment," she told him curtly.

He was not inclined to move. Instead, he turned to face her foursquare and folded his arms stubbornly. "I demand to see Mr. Sato immediately."

She rolled her eyes and tapped one foot impatiently. "He's not available for comment at this time."

"What are you, his secretary?" the man asked, looking very hard at her.

The woman seemed uncomfortable with the steady stare, and backed away slightly. From all appearances, the man's hostile behavior was severely discombobulating her. Kuwabara doubted if she got many people arguing with her. Her manner indicated that she was used to being obeyed on a regular basis without having to give reasons. It reminded him of his sister. He considered taking notes.

"Persis Iolani," she said, not offering to shake hands. "If you have a message for him, I'll relay it to him." Kuwabara could almost hear the '_if it's important enough_' added on to the tail of the sentence.

"Well, Miss Iolani," the old man said with a patronizing air that was clearly evident to Persis, "please tell him that his presentation could disrupt a lot of very delicate circumstances, and will most likely meet with resistance on more than an academic front."

There was a long pause while Persis Iolani digested this. Risking another glance, Kuwabara noticed that her face had gone even paler than it had been before.

"And just what do you mean by that threat?" she asked, ice practically forming on each of her individual words.

Suddenly, the man's entire demeanor changed, as if some suspicion had been confirmed. He drew himself up to his full height, looking the fairly tall woman straight in the eye. "My name," he snapped, accent growing more profound, "is Tyrone Raimund of London. And while that name may not mean anything to you, miss, here's another for you: _Kreau_."

That word didn't make any sense to Kuwabara. It didn't sound like English, nor did it sound like Japanese. He didn't understand more than a few words of the main demonic language (mostly bad ones picked up from Hiei or Kurama), but it had a similar guttural ring to it.

However, it clearly meant something to Persis Iolani. She drew in one sharp breath, stepping backwards as if slapped. Her head went down between her shoulders and for one brief instant, Kuwabara could hear a growl.

Raimund had obviously scored a point. He smiled smugly. "I thought so. Miss Iolani, let's talk," he said sweetly, sweeping one hand out toward the door.

_No, no, no!_ Kuwabara thought desperately. _Stay out here, where I can hear you… _This was all damn peculiar. What or who was 'Kreau'?

It seemed he wasn't going to get an easy answer to his question. The woman edged closer to the door before pausing, balancing on her tiptoes uneasily. Raimund smiled tolerantly and moved back so she could get to the door without getting too close to him. Persis pulled a card from her pocket and held it near the electronic lock keeping the door closed, and it beeped obligingly. She swung the door open, spinning on one foot in order to continue to face the older man.

Raimund followed her in, much more casually. Indeed, he acted as if he had the upper hand.

Kuwabara's eyebrows had shot towards his hairline at the actions of the woman Persis Iolani. Having been exposed to quite a lot of demons recently, he had learned to 'read' the crudest of body language typical to that species. He was nothing on actual demons, who could practically have an entire philosophical conversation between themselves without speaking a word, but he knew the basics—and Persis Iolani was practically screaming 'threatened demon'. She wasn't turning her back on the potential threat, for one thing. Most humans would turn away, if only to keep their thoughts and emotions from showing on their faces and revealing too much or trying not to look at something that scared them. Oh, and the staring. Demons hated that.

Well, this was damned interesting…

And no walls were going to foil Kuwabara Kazuma this easily when he was interested! Putting aside the disturbing vibrations from all around with no little effort, the teen focused on the door, trying to listen past it.

It was just a matter of listening far enough…

Slowly, the demonic interference died away enough for Kuwabara to hear most of the conversation in Conference Room Ten; a conversation that had degenerated into an argument, it seemed, as soon as the door had closed behind them.

"What the hell do you want!?" That was Persis, practically howling with rage.

"I could ask you the same question!" Raimund hissed back. In contrast, his voice remained relatively controlled. "This—" Even separated from them by a door and walls, Kuwabara could practically see the man gesture wildly. "—is madness! You'll blow the world off its hinges, you fool!"

Persis' next words were colder than ice and twice as hard. "Who are you to judge." It was not a question; rather, a statement of scorn.

"I'm one of the ones who keep things balanced, and you and Sato are going to send the worlds all off kilter! The situation's bad enough here without your lot screaming from the rooftops—or are the disruptions your work too?"

Having worked himself into a right snit, he didn't wait for an answer. "Oh, that's just perfect! The right word in the right place—or should I say the wrong word in the wrong place? What do you _think_ you're doing, you brainless bitch?"

Persis yowled with rage—and it was a yowl, Kuwabara's cat Eikichi made similar noises when her tail got stepped on—and lunged at the man. Kuwabara could sense her move, and he briefly considered trying to take out the door with brute strength alone and come to the man's rescue.

As it turned out, it wasn't necessary. A heartbeat later, he felt her stop short, drawing back as if threatened. After a few moments of tense silence, she said in a brittle voice, "Who sent you here?"

"No one, missy. You should know I work only for myself—but no, maybe you don't. Your accent, everything, it's of this world. Very interesting…"

"Get out," Persis snapped. Kuwabara could imagine her with her back pressed against the wall. "Leave me alone."

"Not with all this so openly displayed," Tyrone Raimund shot back. "This is dangerous, Persis Iolani. You're riding a volcano here. No matter how this plays out, you're going to lose."

Inside Conference Room Ten, Persis drew herself up, consciously trying to look less like a scared animal. She squared her shoulders and folded her arms, looking the serious Tyrone Raimund straight in the eye. Every inch of her was screaming _hunter-hunter-hunter-danger-run-run-run-run-RUN!_ But she had no choice but to stand her ground. One of the display cabinets she'd helped to set up, containing a dozen or so priceless pieces of evidence, pressed into her side.

"This is no business of yours," she said coldly. "Get out." Behind her back, she groped for the cell phone she'd just put in her pocket, visualizing the buttons and screen in her mind's eye.

"You can't do this," he told her, returning her wary gaze with a steady one.

"I can't stop it."

He didn't miss a beat. "I can."

Persis stared at him as he pulled a length of metal out of his pocket and started fiddling with it. "What are you doing?!"

"Disposing of evidence. If this gets out it'll blow the worlds to shreds and you know it!"

"You can't _do_ that!" Persis' eyes flew open wide and her instincts flew out the metaphorical window as she leapt at the hunter and tried to wrest the weapon from him.

He threw her off without much effort, as one of her hands was still fiddling with her phone, with enough force, however, to send her tumbling across the floor into a row of chairs. They clattered around her and over her painfully, and she cursed to herself. Damn, she was out of practice.

Gathering her feet underneath her to spring back up and take another shot at Raimund, who was laying into the thick glass with a will, she was stopped by a faint voice coming from her phone. She recognized it as the conference security force headquarters, which she'd programmed into the little device's memory some time back.

"I need security in Room Ten on the double!" she snapped, over the sound of breaking glass, which would be easily heard on the other end of the line.

The security center replied, but she cut the connection and approached Raimund again. He seemed slightly thrown by her unexpectedly human response, and, lowering the charged baton, stared at her warily.

"Destroy all you want, Tyrone Raimund," she said wearily. "But think for a second. There's no way in the three worlds—" He knew already, why try to hide it? "—that we would have gotten here on no proof and no backup."

By the look on his face that he didn't hide in time, he had thought of that.

"This is an internationally famous conference, and sure it would get the word out as fast as anything. But I'm not the only one with interests invested in it. Do you think we could have gotten here without divulging information? It's all been checked and double-checked and verified around the globe. It's just been kept quiet. This is bigger than just me, and destroying this exhibit, or, indeed, killing me, wouldn't stop it."

Raimund ignored her, and turned back to demolishing the exhibit. But before he could get through any more glass, a posse of armed security officers smashed through the door.

A very human, but unexpectedly efficient tactic, as it turned out. Raimund's baton was confiscated, and the man himself was led off, but not before shooting a deliberately cold look at the all-but-smirking Persis Iolani, who covered it by attending to the display cabinet he'd smashed.

* * *

In all the confusion, no one was paying attention to the open door, and that gave Kuwabara, still hiding out in the corridor, a perfect opportunity to slip into the conference hall.

Once inside, he avoided the handful of cops still present and the smug Persis, who was straightening the display and ignoring said cops adroitly, refusing to give them any more information than she already had in a blizzard of half-truths worthy of Kurama at his best (or worst).

_Perfect,_ he thought, slipping into another aisle of cabinets. They'd set up an entire exhibit worthy of a natural history museum, where, Kuwabara figured, this stuff would probably end up if by some freak of chance, they did end up telling their story to the world.

_Shit, this is pretty clear stuff,_ he thought, gaping at a clearly demonic skeleton, that of an almost-reptilian bird with a snake-like tail, trailing almost a foot behind it, three eye sockets, and a hooked and serrated beak, that was on display, lying in state with almost every bone filled in. Those that were missing only added to the verisimilitude of the skeletons—how many complete dinosaur skeletons were found, all at once? Behind it was an artist's sketch of what the bird might have looked like while it was alive. From impressions in the surrounding dirt, the artist had even gotten the slightly scaly skin down, although it was shaded a sandy brown instead of the dull, sickly black it actually was.

Despite the rather minor color distortion, Kuwabara recognized it. He'd seen one not that long ago: things like it leaked through the barrier all the time. This type had been a problem—it was carnivorous (no duh!) and ate whatever it could snatch, even people, especially people that it could carry off, like children. Like pigeons, they apparently thrived everywhere, human world or demon world. The birds' showing up in America, too, wasn't surprising.

There'd been a colony roosting in a skyscraper, and trying to kill birds while they were flying about your head trying to eat you, seventeen stories up, had been semi-officially voted No Fun At All, In Any Way, Shape, Or Form.

_This is such a bad sign for us being able to pull this thing off,_ Kuwabara thought, moving on to the next display, a simple map of the area wherein the bird had been found. _She's got a point, about the big broadcast being only a sideshow—oh, _triple_ shit! Where the hell did they dig up this!_

The next exhibit was a full-scale model, stuffed and posed, of a definitely more humanoid demon. About Yusuke's height if it stood up straight, it was half-hunched over in a fiercely feral pose, stubby fingers tipped with hard, accurate-looking claws drenched with fake blood. Its hands, thicker than a human's, had faint pad-like areas on the palm that was stretched toward the glass. Razor-sharp fangs were bared in a terrifying snarl, and its muzzle was elongated like a dog's.

It was enough to make anyone jump, turning the corner to suddenly face something like that, and Kuwabara, who was usually able to sense a demon coming, was no exception. With a strangled cry, he gaped at it for the half-second it took his wits to return.

_They could run a freaking haunted house on this, f'rget the science stuff,_ he scoffed. _Damn! That's just _sen_sational! If they're looking for viewers, that'll get 'em._

Kuwabara was interrupted in his speculations on thrill-seekers by a call from the main seating section. Evidently he'd been louder than he'd thought. _Or maybe,_ he reminded himself, _she can smell ya or something. Demon, remember…_

"Who's there?"

_Nobody, nothing…_

He could hear her start to move, and Kuwabara started looking for ways out. Concentrating, he tried to predict which way she'd come from.

This was infuriating! He needed to know something about the person he was trying to predict (Yusuke, for example, was easy most of the time) and he knew very little about this Persis what's-her-name. Clearly the woman was a demon in disguise; that much was evident from the way she'd reacted to Raimund. She was obviously not a recent arrival from the way she resorted to human forces.

Also, she was in this, it seemed, for herself. Otherwise, why expose secrets about the demon and spirit worlds to a human world that he had always been told didn't need to know about anything supernatural?

Making a guess, he headed deeper into the room, counting on there being a back way out. Shooting careful glances to right and left in hope of tracking Persis' movements, he could hear her footsteps slowing as she exercised caution in approaching the displays. From her point of view, there could be anything hiding behind them, from white mice to ogres.

Kuwabara was glad of that. It gave him an advantage that he desperately needed. He quickened his pace, wishing he hadn't put on boots this morning.

As he ran through the increasingly complicated maze, hoping he wouldn't turn an unexpected corner and run straight into Persis, he also skimmed the displays and panels so laboriously set up in preparation for the biggest exposé of the twenty-first century. In detail, they documented the discovery of the skeletons and artifacts, most if not all of the tests that had been run on them, and, just to top it all off, a huge panel that covered almost all of one wall and read, in large clear letters, _BALANCED WORLDS?_ Accompanying it was an interestingly triune diagram that made Kuwabara very nervous.

He stopped short in front of it, and glanced around. Clearly, this theory, so blatantly presented, was the crown of their presentation. Behind him was the display-bounded corridor he'd just made his way down. To the left, the only exit led back into the main room, where Persis had, apparently, stopped her search for him in favor of rummaging through a display case. Objects shifted under her hands with a clatter, and he winced at the damage that was surely being done.

A second later, he realized that he'd been sent to destroy the stuff anyway. Why did he care what she did to it?

But that still left him with no avenue of escape besides out into the open. He paused, indecisive.

From the black-draped wall on his right came a tapping noise, muffled by the curtains. Kuwabara looked over at it before focusing.

Well, that aura was clear enough. The day he didn't recognize _that_ was the day he retired and went off to raise bees. Or something.

"Hiei?" he whispered, hoping Persis wouldn't hear.

Instead of a verbal answer, a hidden door opened. The little fire demon peered around it and put one finger to his lips in a very human 'sssh!' Kuwabara mentally bookmarked it to tease him about later.

At the moment, though, he had other priorities, namely escaping the room he'd tried so hard to get into. Gratefully leaving the maze behind, he followed Hiei into the room 'backstage'.

'Backstage' was filled with everything from wires and boxes to more wires and switches, adding to that even _more_ wires and a bottle of root beer. At the moment, it was empty of any workers who might have been attending to the Gordian knots slowly growing together all over the floor and walls. Some had even slunk their way up to the ceiling, and had begun to reach ominous tendrils towards the floor. Left to grow, the wires would eventually infest the entire room. Or so it seemed. Kuwabara was of the opinion that cables were demonic anyway, in the worst way possible—omnipresent, evil, and to stupid to know.

"How did you get in there?" Hiei asked.

"The obvious way," Kuwabara retorted, reacting to the seemingly default sarcasm. "I walked in the front door."

"They didn't notice?"

"In case you only just got here, shorty, there was a psycho who broke in and tried to destroy the exhibit! They were kind of distracted. And before I forget, what's the word _Kreau_ mean?"

"You mean, like we're supposed to be doing?" Hiei pointed out before he registered the last question. "Where the hell did you hear that?"

"That nutter I mentioned? Called himself that. It scared the demon-lady—that scientist's a demon, did you notice?—half shitless."

"Of course I noticed. Kreau is a name. Ask the fox."

Kuwabara's hands formed into fists in frustration. That last sentence was a familiar first volley in a game of Kuwabara-ping-pong. Kurama would lie, Hiei would refuse to use sentences longer than three words, and they'd both send him off to the other at the first opportunity. He'd be running from one to the other trying to get all the facts, and he'd _never_ get them all. They probably thought it was funny.

He gave it up. "Why're you here anyway? Urameshi's been looking for you. I don't think he trusts you not to start barbequing people."

"Ch. We've got bigger problems than crowds." Kuwabara could have sworn he saw a shudder at the very idea of crowds of humans. He hid it well, if it was there at all, and gestured curtly before walking off.

Obedient to one of the half-recognized hand signals they'd adopted for using through noise, usually of battle, Kuwabara followed him.

"What is it? What's up? Where are we going? Why are we going there? Who says?"

Hiei managed to ignore all the questions and kept walking, keeping to the service hallways in favor of emerging into the bustling convention center proper.

"Aargh!" Kuwabara yelled finally, snatching Hiei's cloak and dragging him to a halt. "Talk, shrimp!"

Hiei hissed a familiar phrase in the Makai dialect and then repeated himself in Japanese: "Don't touch me." He pulled away nervously. Having gotten the attention he'd been seeking, Kuwabara let go.

"Tell me what's going on, damn it!"

A single sigh served to convey total despair in the human race. "There's a colony of demons in the basement. And they're getting madder by the minute."

Kuwabara paused, blinked. "What?"

"Was there some word you did not understand?"

"Shut up." But the snap was only reflexive: that changed everything. Suddenly the display of dead things and stone shards were a lot less relevant. A living group of demons, probably stupid and violent if they were living in a basement, just waiting to come out and wreak havoc. On top of the presentation.

"Shit," Kuwabara said finally. "Who else knows?"

"The detective. The fox. And probably the hunter—Kreau."

Them, in other words. The Reikai Tantei. One major world-upheaval up top. One disaster waiting to happen down below. As if they didn't need more work.

"This was so not in the freaking job description," Kuwabara muttered. "I'm going to go raise bees."

The bees would have to wait, for he'd barely closed his mouth before several floors away, by the sound of it, something very big and important exploded. The floor shook beneath their feet, mortar and dust creating a sudden indoor shower. In the distance, sirens started to wail.

And Kuwabara's headache got worse by several orders of magnitude: lots of demons, very angry, very active, and doing something about it.

* * *

**Author's Notes:** Seeing as there're maybe seven people reading this story all told, I'm not going to bother with the sorry this took so long routine. It just wouldn't work out. And then, in math class today (checks clock) um, yesterday, the entire plot for this section just fell on my head fully formed. Now the hard part is going to be coordinating action for the next two chapters before we move onto the next arc! Also, _kudos to anyone who gets the joke behind the beekeeping allusions_. Anyone who doesn't is welcome to ask. Please review. (Grayangle, I'll look at the hyperlinks later. The next arc is going to be heavily into tech. Thanks again for all your invaluable help.) 


	7. 1'6: Delta Vee

**Chapter Six: Delta-Vee (ΔV)**

**The Story Thus Far:** After a brief glimpse into a world destroyed by a war involving all of the three worlds, _Uneven Odds_ took a trip back to the origin point of the disaster, which turned out to be an archaeology dig in the American Southwest that turned up demonic remains and artifacts. Thanks to a fast-forward of several years to the point a little while after the Dark Tournament ended so spectacularly, the dig's findings have been distributed across cyberspace and the newspapers, coming by chance to the attention of Yusuke, who rounded up his gang and marched off to inform Koenma. Koenma, thanks to his ignoring of all meager reports from that area, was taken off guard and had no choice but to send his Reikai Tantei off to America to do some damage control, or failing that, at least some damage. They spent several fruitless days roaming about the conference center until Kuwabara snuck into the lecture hall where the secret of demons would be revealed to the mainstream world. Almost chased down by one of the scientists, whom he believes to be a demon, he escaped into a back passageway just before something not too far off exploded. That's seventy-six pages of MS Word compressed into one paragraph, so I hope you're happy.

**Disclaimer:** I own neither Yu Yu Hakusho nor anyone associated with it, except various original characters that I have invented. I also do not own any allusions to the Sherlock Holmes stories, the Doctor Who or Star Trek TV franchises, or the really clever book _Relic_ (Douglas Preston/Lincoln Child). Any people in general who do not belong in the YYH universe and have snuck in here anyway are not my fault.

**ON WITH THE SHOW!**

_**11:35 AM: T-minus 90**_

Tyrone Raimund, demon hunter emeritus, resisted the temptation to kick his heels against the wall, instead lacing his fingers together and cracking his knuckles to relieve some of the frustration building up in him steadily. This was putting a serious crimp in his agenda. Being locked up in a holding cell with unfriendly people on guard tends to do that to agendas.

He still couldn't believe the absolute nerve of that woman. He had no doubt that she was the motivating force behind the flagrant exposé occurring not three floors above him. What he couldn't understand was why.

Raimund closed his eyes, ignoring the discomfort incurred by the cot he was sitting on. Chained and bolted to the ground, it was the only piece of furniture in the cell, so he had no choice. Between that and the floor, he'd take the cot any day. Attempting to suppress his frustration, he reviewed what he knew, trying to find the mistake he'd made.

It had seemed simple. He'd received a brochure full of information, compliments of one of the scientific journals he subscribed to, at his London home, and skimmed it interestedly. Paging past the proposed presentations on collision-course asteroids, the Sphinx of Egypt, a panel on disposal of nuclear waste, and lasers, his eyes had fallen on a topic that made him have to read it twice.

Labeled rather vaguely 'Beyond the Missing Link: New Worlds of Evolution', there had nevertheless been a brief summary beneath that heading. _Archaeologist Kobayashi-maru Sato presents his findings revolving around a collection of previously unknown specimens discovered in the Arizona desert. _At first glance, innocuous; at a second glance for most people, mildly interesting.

But Tyrone Raimund had spent most of his life fighting the creatures that seemingly only he could see, and he was well aware of at least one version of demonic history. For example, he knew that demons had once been spread worldwide, existing alongside humans. He had theorized that the two races came from a common origin, living as they did in closely parallel worlds, but where humanity had mostly settled on one form, demons had branched out, becoming endlessly creative with their forms and abilities. However, he had no proof of that. It could easily be wrong.

He knew that at one point, the demon race had come to the human world and settled in quite comfortably. This had taken various forms and caused equally varied effects. Some came just to live, others to conquer, still others just to kill.

With time, the demons become more than powerful enough to eventually wipe out the humans. At that point, he learned, the spirits, who were another story altogether, had taken a hand. Somehow they had lured the majority of all demons back into the world they had originally come from. They had raised a barrier to keep the most powerful and dangerous demons in their world, but were not able to completely separate the worlds. Small, relatively harmless demons had managed to slip through over the centuries.

On top of that, the spirit world had not been able to entice all the demons into the trap. Some had stayed, and found themselves cut off from the majority of their race and their greatest source of power. The demons who remained declined in power and number; their descendents even more so. However, there were still a considerable number of so-called 'native' demons worldwide.

Tyrone Raimund had taken one look at that phrase, 'previously unknown specimens', and started to get worried. Even more so when he looked further and saw a panel presentation by the man overwhelmingly favored as the leading candidate for the Nobel Prize for physics. Dominic Massey was also scheduled to present, and he would be lecturing on his theory of bound parallel worlds.

Raimund didn't believe in the overwhelming stupidity of the human race, especially not at the Rikidyce International Biological Sciences Media and Broadcast Annual Convention. It was infamous for announcing actually relevant and useful topics, and was attended by top scientists from all over the world, as well as the curious public, who were allowed free-range attendance to the displays and lectures pitched to their intellectual level. It was also a major press event, with scientific journals looking for contributors and newspapers looking for story. An enormous number of TV channels would inevitably be represented. Any scientist presenting at Rikidyce (whether physicist, astronomer, biologist, chemist, or the various permutations thereof, for the conference title had not been changed with the attendance) was guaranteed a wide range of attention.

Someone would be bound to add two and two, get five, and find the missing piece of the puzzle. And what better place to do it than a media convention? It would be all over the world within days.

Now, Tyrone Raimund liked the world as it was. He'd spent a huge amount of time and energy wiping out those apparitions that presented a threat to him, those around him, and eventually the entire city. He'd made a name for himself among demons, and on several occasions journeyed into the Demon World itself to finish a hunt. There he saw how dangerous demons could be, for the demon plane was the home of those creatures not tamed and tethered by human influences—they were demons in all their savagery. Still he had proved that a human could be more than a match for a demon.

After several decades, he had ended up being given a name, half title of respect and half curse. _Kreau_, he heard himself referred to as behind his back and to his face. Despite learning a large part of the language spoken in the demon world, he didn't know the word _kreau_ off-hand. He'd wracked his memory and come up with several things he hoped weren't linguistically connected but eventually turned up a translation as simply _stranger,_ but overlaid with strong fear. Most words in the demon language changed with their emotional context—the vocabulary was huge.

After receiving the injury that almost crippled him and still plagued him with a weakness in his leg, he had thrown off the demon world and returned to his home, where nothing remained to jump at him and try to eat him or worse. His reputation protected him, and he had been mostly left alone lately. He kind of liked it. It was certainly less tense.

Yes, Tyrone Raimund liked his world. He believed that he was through with demons and that demons were through with him. A philosophy of mutual ignorance that would allow him to live out his retirement years without having to squabble with demons while wielding a cane. But when he got that brochure in the mail, it seemed that he would have to get into one last fight to keep that peace.

So he'd come to America and San Francisco, only to be caught in the act of getting rid of the evidence. That woman—the demon masquerading as a human—had surprised him by her response. He had expected her to try to stop him with violence. Instead she fell back on human authority. That was unusual.

He had made a mistake. And so here he was in this cell. Outside, in Conference Room Ten, he knew that demon woman was getting ready to announce to the world the truth about demons and other worlds. And would that ever attract attention!

If the worlds would just leave each other alone, he thought angrily, life would be so much easier. Humans wouldn't have to worry about the monsters down in the sewers, or those that provoke anger in perfectly normal people while standing behind them invisibly. No more disasters because some demon wanted to show off. The demons could stay in their world and kill each other endlessly. And the spirits could go back to their roles as the uninvolved Counters of Everything, as one cynical but harmless demon had named them while Raimund was hunting the demon world. That had promised to be an eye-opener and had delivered. To his incredulous surprise, plenty of demons had been scared of him even without his reputation. He'd almost ended up thinking that he was the boogeyman, not them!

The last thing he wanted was the worlds actively and openly involved with each other. That would mean chaos.

Of course, stuck in a cell, there was all of nothing he could do about it. He really needed to get out of here.

Raimund sighed again, attracting no attention from the two rent-a-cops posted outside. One blew out smoke from his cigarette, but otherwise nothing happened.

"'scuse me, gents."

Both cops looked up, surprised. A gangly man in an ugly brown sweater edged round the door, gesturing casually for their attention. They stared at him, wondering what his purpose here was. Through the door, Raimund couldn't hear his voice, but a glance was all it took for the elderly man to read his lips.

The man looked at them, through the see-through plastic door at Raimund, then back at the cops. Shoulders sagging, he rolled his eyes and pulled a camera out of the black fanny pack wrapped around his waist.

Finally, one of the men moved. "Sir, please explain your purpose here."

The newcomer paid him no mind. "Now, smile, please." Before either could react, he pointed the lens at them, shut his eyes tightly, and pressed the flash.

With absolutely no warning of the change of venue, Raimund awoke sprawled on the floor in a rather uncomfortable position with someone slapping at his face.

"Stop it!" Raimund shouted, or tried to. It came out more as "srrrrrrrrmt', and the irked swat at the intrusive hand fizzled out as a convulsion barely worthy of a landed fish.

"That's more like it," an irritating voice cheered him on. "Keep at it." The voice followed his own advice, and aimed another slap at his face.

"All right, I'm awake!" Raimund complained groggily, succeeding in pushing the hand away from him. "Who the hell are you? And what was that?"

Sitting up and vilely cursing his bad leg and the demon that'd ripped its claws through him from chest to toe in the same breath, Raimund managed to focus on the same badly-dressed man that had held the camera.

He was just taking a seat on the cot, and as Raimund watched, he scowled at the piece of thinly stuffed plastic that passed for a mattress and stood up scornfully. Looking down at the retired demon hunter, both of his eyebrows shot up. "And _you're_ Tyrone Raimund, is that correct?"

Raimund matched him scowl for scowl. "That's not what I asked, young man. I believe I asked your name first."

The man shrugged and picked at his ugly sweater. "That'd be a yes, I presume. Pleased to meet you, Tyrone Raimund." He did not offer to shake hands. "You can call me Jeremy, and for now, I'm the man who's busting you outta jail." Now that Raimund could hear his voice, he had a distinctively southern US accent—casual and drawling and looking for trouble.

"Why?" Raimund asked, a question he had always found useful. "And after you answer that, what did you do?"

'Jeremy' answered the second question first, and quite unsuccessfully. "It's a flash camera. A descendent of the flash bomb, only it gets through customs and it knocks people out, 'stead of killing them. It's better that way. Less paperwork."

He was about to tell a lie something along the lines of 'I see' but stopped as one word went through his head. "Paperwork."

"Yeah, 's a pain in the butt, we can't be bothered half the time…"

Raimund cut him off before 'Jeremy' could really go into a rant. "You're not human. You're a spirit of some kind."

The spirit chewed that one over. "Yeah, that'll work. I don't have a better word."

"Right…so why are you here?"

'Jeremy' shrugged. "Orders from up top. Apparently there's some kinda anthill getting kicked up over here."

He paused and shot Raimund a sideways look that attempted to be sneaky and did not fool the man at all. "Don't suppose you'd know anything about that?" he added casually.

"You don't fool me," Raimund told him flatly. "Don't tell me _you're_ damage control."

"Well…" Jeremy looked uncomfortable.

"You're it. You're all. Oh my God…what the hell is your department thinking?"

Jeremy shot him a dirty glare. "Ever heard the phrase CYA, grampa?"

Raimund really wished for something to hit the spirit with. "One out-of-touch spirit who carries around a 'flash camera'. Who came up with that anyway? Don't answer that, I don't care!" The stress of the last few hours was catching up with him, and Raimund let it all out with enthusiasm. "A squad of Cub Scouts with water guns could do better! What were you planning on doing, smothering whoever's to blame with that sweater?"

"Um, actually…'scuse me? I was kind of thinking of getting help…"

"So you have some semblance of intelligence, good," Raimund steamed. "What kind of help? Do you have a team on location now?"

"Beats me. Everything's all mixed up with this anthill, running around. We can't get anything from HQ; I suppose they're a little busy over there. The boss doesn't exactly run checkups on us, so we've kind of let everything go…"

Raimund considered taking a nightstick from one of the still-unconscious guards, but decided against it. "Wonderful. Just brilliant. You've got no one."

Jeremy waved his hands defensively. "There's gotta be someone around here who can help! The boss can be lazy sometimes, but I can't see him just letting us handle it…er, letting it play out. And there've got to be others around too."

Crossing his arms over his chest, Raimund glared at Jeremy tyrannically. "So just how are you going to persuade these people, whomever they may be, to help you?"

Twisting his fingers in the strap of his fanny pack, Jeremy looked around for inspiration.

Inspiration delivered itself in the form of the sound of a large, somewhat muffled detonation not far off, clearly somewhere within the building.

Quite against his will, Raimund's eyes widened, and he let out a low whistle. "Oh."

Jeremy grinned, and thrust out the hand still holding the stun charge-cum-camera. "Here, have this."

Raimund took it off him, too distracted to refuse and still staring in shock in the general direction of the blast. He was also too sidetracked to realize that he'd been handed, at the same time, a Spirit World version of a police badge that had denoted Jeremy's status as troubleshooter.

"Welcome to damage control, Tyrone Raimund. It's all yours. Good luck!"

"_What?"_ Raimund howled in shock, spinning around just in time to see Jeremy scoot out the door as quickly as he could.

* * *

Finding Yusuke, for people equipped with only the normal five senses, would have been nearly impossible and dependant on sheer luck in the chaos that was an inevitable result of an explosion. For a telepath and a psychic, it was much easier.

They finally caught up with him in one of the long galleries that overlooked the beautiful college campus, a mixture of greenery, reddish buildings, and black roads crisscrossing the landscape. In the distance, the sea was faintly visible, a dull, angry grey under an overcast sky. A faint wind was blowing, making the taller trees shake slightly, when the mismatched duo reached the top of the staircase. A broken window, courtesy of the shock wave that had originated several stories below, was allowing some of that wind to enter the gallery, bringing with it the mélange of smells that made up the air of San Francisco mixed with that of Pacific Ocean.

The scenery was not helped by the frantically whooping fire alarms, or by the static of the simultaneously panicking and failing PA system. Not to mention, of course, that the explosion had, by the feel, taken out a sizeable amount of infrastructure—the floor was beginning to feel a little unstable.

"Urameshi!" Kuwabara shouted the instant his foot touched the bottom step. He found a spot of carpet that felt relatively anchored and stopped short. "What the hell is going on?"

"We are royally screwed," Yusuke said distractedly. "About time you got here."

"The idiot," Hiei proclaimed, "is slow."

Kuwabara flipped him off. "That's not good enough, Urameshi!" he persisted. "The shrimp says there are demons in the basement. How can there be a horde of demons in the basement?"

"I don't know!" Yusuke shouted back, running his fingers through his hair and absentmindedly wiping gel off his hands onto his green hoodie. "But can't you feel it? They must be what were causing your headaches."

"Yeah, maybe. I thought we were over a fault in the barrier or something. Guess not. All right, then, gang, let's go demon hunting!"

Kuwabara paused. "Hey, wait a second, where's Red?"

"Who knows? He shows up at odd times, worse than shorty here—wait a second." A grin spread over Yusuke's face, and he rolled his eyes. "He did this _all_ the time at the Dark Tournament, remember? We'd be looking for him, just like this, and it'd turn out he was behind us all the time. I bet he thinks it's funny."

"Yeah, great theory, Urameshi…except, where the hell is he then?"

"Ah…" Yusuke deflated somewhat. "Good question."

There was a faintly embarrassed pause, during which the sounds of chaos took over.

"Honestly, Yusuke, you have no patience," Kurama sighed. "And yes, it's hilarious." He was just coming up the far staircase. There was dust in his mane of hair. "Why are you still here?"

Kuwabara pointed to Yusuke before the fox had finished his sentence. "His fault. He thought we should wait for you. So now that we're here…c'mon, leader, _lead_."

"Yeah, yeah…Kurama, any chance you've been exploring down there, know anything useful? Where've you been, anyway?"

"In point of fact, staying out of your way. You're the Spirit Detective; it wouldn't hurt you to do some detecting for once."

"Hey, I detect, fox-boy!"

"As you say, Yusuke… This is a science conference. I was curious. If we had time and if you cared, I'd tell you about some of it, it's really quite fascinating. Since we don't—" the fox caught Yusuke's Look and changed tactics, "—I should have realized sooner that the entire building smelled of demon, and recently, too. I thought it was an old scent, but as I went down to the lower floors, I discovered that it smelled more and more strongly."

"Where have they been hiding all this time? How come no one noticed?" Kuwabara wondered aloud.

Kurama laced his hands together as if preparing for a lecture. "I am not quite sure, but a few theories make sense. The most likely is based on the fact that California is known for its earthquakes. It only stands to reason that this building has been knocked down in the tremors before. If the collapse was long enough ago, and the collapsed building fallen into a ravine, it could conceptually have been built over. This center is actually built on the ruins of the original one, which is still partly intact, if mostly inaccessible."

As he spoke, Kurama attempted to illustrate with hand motions in the air. Yusuke squinted at him.

"Yeah, I think I get it," he said slowly. "You mean there's a whole 'nother building down there? Why's no one spotted it before?"

"Conceivably no one cares. If it was long enough ago and any documentation was lost, no one would be able to find out, either. The entryway I found was quite small. The builders did an excellent job of sealing over the ruins."

"So the demons live down there, huh?" Yusuke grumbled. "Figures. It's always something evil in the basement, have you noticed?"

"Speak for yourself, idiot. Personally I remember trying to catch evil demonic crow things seventeen stories up."

"You know, I'd really tried to forget about that; thanks a bunch, Kuwabara."

"I mean, they can't be very powerful, living down under a college campus," Kuwabara pointed out.

"I hope not. That would sure make my life easier, they were just a bunch of C-class or lower."

"If they are C demons, then there must be a lot of them to emit that strong of an aura. And C-class are stupid, Detective. You'll have to fight the lot of them."

"You don't sound too unhappy about that, Hiei," Yusuke grinned.

"I wonder what they eat, stuck down there." Kuwabara was still wondering about the underground thing.

"Beetles?" Kurama replied, without breaking a smile. "Each other?"

"If you didn't sound so serious, Red, I'd think that was a joke."

"Freshmen?"

"Now I know you're tryin' t' be funny."

"If you can find one smart enough to talk, you can ask it," Yusuke cut him off. "Hey, wait a second."

"What?" Kurama and Kuwabara asked more or less in unison. Hiei managed to look curious without changing his expression.

"Maybe this is just in movies, but wouldn't you think there'd be a lot more, y'know, shaking around what with an explosion in the basement and all? Seems to me we've settled down a little bit."

Kurama looked down at the floor, conceivably trying to find an answer. He was absently trying to get the majority of the dust out of his hair at the same time. It seemed to be permanently entangled. "This is a big building; it should be stable for a while seeing as there was only one blast."

"Well, maybe we should _get moving_ before there's another one and all the stairs fall out, huh?" Kuwabara tried to chivvy the other three in the general direction of the downstairs staircase.

"No, I don't think so," Kurama continued, not moving an inch. "As I said, the only passageway that I found between this conference center and the demons' territory was quite small."

"Did you go through it?"

"_Very_ small, Yusuke. If I could get through, it would have to be on four feet, and I have neither power nor permission to do that sort of thing here."

"So the demons wanted escape," Hiei interjected, taking up the redhead's train of thought. "Once they'd created one exit, there would be no need to cause more destruction, possibly damage to their escape tunnel, by—"

He was cut off by the sound of another detonation below them, followed closely by a wave of impact that caused the group to variously stagger, sprawl, or look disdainfully at everyone else, depending.

"On second thought, of course," Hiei concluded thoughtfully as the others regained their footing, "they are probably stupid."

Yusuke griped, "Yeah, Hiei, great. Let's work on having those second thoughts first, 'kay? Well, looks like it's time for us to do what we do best. Let's go kick some demon ass, guys."

* * *

Hurtling down the stairs, stepping agilely around various versions of debris, Yusuke suppressed an urge to laugh hysterically. He was sick and tired of sneaking around and pretending to be just a normal tourist. After spending most of the last couple years entrenched in supernatural affairs of all kinds, bumming around acting normal got a little bit boring. Granted, it was safer, if you ruled out The Wrath of Forces of Nature like his girlfriend Keiko or Kuwabara's big sister Shizuru, but he couldn't help feeling that this was more what his life was supposed to be like. Charging down a staircase ready to unleash whatever power was needed on some slimy demon horde?

He was all for it.

About halfway down to ground level, where he could feel a serious amount of abovementioned horde, he surrendered to the impulse and started laughing, still running. He managed not to look around at his teammates, who were following close on his heels, but suspected they were probably wondering what the heck he was thinking, and if he'd finally snapped.

In point of fact, they weren't. Kuwabara's thoughts were running along much the same lines as Yusuke's, something like 'This is more like it!' Needless to say, Hiei was looking forward to the opportunity to _act_ instead of skulk. The adrenaline rush had even spread to Kurama, who was beginning to sprout fangs and replace human fingernails with claws, and who, like Hiei, had passed that 'snapped' point years ago.

Yusuke paused for a few seconds on the landing right above ground level to take in the battlefield.

Accurately speaking, it was chaos. The large central entryway, which he thought he'd heard called an atrium somewhere, looked as if someone had drilled a very deep hole with a very large jackhammer through it. Ceiling tile, carpet, various bits of furniture, and, from the sound of it, several people, had vanished into the hole that had appeared in the middle of the rather nice indoor garden that the atrium had once sported.

There was a faint, but increasing, scent of blood filling the air, although heavily overlaid by the reeks of explosives, dirt, stone, and body odor emanating from frightened humans. Kurama had mentioned in passing a few times that fear had a specific smell, and now Yusuke was catching a rerun of what he meant. He'd smelled it before, from a large, frightened crowd.

It smelled like the final round of the Dark Tournament had, and that pissed him off extremely just by association.

As he watched, more demons, of the lower, stupid class dubbed officially 'C-Class', unofficially classified as 'weak and ugly', dragged themselves from the pit. Their lives underground had clearly taken quite a toll. They were filthy, they smelled of sewer and mold and rot, and some of them reminded Yusuke briefly of one of his elementary school biology classes, in the course of which they'd looked at pictures of fish from deep under the sea where no light ever shone. All of them were pale underneath the filth and some were nearly translucent, with huge, mainly useless eyes, and an abundance of large ears.

Needless to say, the majority of the humans were screaming. Most of them were running about in all directions as the creatures from the pit (Yusuke had to admit, they'd picked a pretty familiar way to make their entrance) pursued them clumsily as they adjusted to the open air and the light. That light seemed to be the humans' greatest weapon. The cleverer ones had moved to stand in the shafts of light flooding in through the windows. The cleverest had taken the doors and were still accelerating.

There was almost no action being taken, with a few exceptions. One man had grabbed a fire extinguisher off the wall and had successfully repelled the demons that had come the way of him and the blonde beside him. To her credit, she was using the portable debris to repel the ones that he missed. As Yusuke's gaze crossed her and her companion, she hit one between the eyes with a rock, a satisfying cracking sound, and a shout of triumph. They appeared to be holding their own quite nicely, as if they were used to this sort of thing.

Several other humans were attempting to fight off the demons using only their hands, or whatever they happened to have in them. Yusuke could see cameras, purses, and walking sticks being called into play as self-defense weapons. One woman had her keys in hand and was using pepper spray with relish that was clearly surprising her, although not as much as it was surprising the demons unlucky enough to come within range of her Keys of Doom.

Most people, however, were simply trying to run away, with limited success. On one hand, the demons were still maladjusted to their new environment. On the other hand, demons—most demons—were essentially mobile weapons with varying levels of brains. The carnage was growing. Not only were the demons wreaking havoc, but, in the chaos, the humans were trampling and fighting each other in the rush to get away. Some were pouring out into the streets; others were running deeper into the building.

From the inner rooms, there came the sound of gunshots.

"The security services," Kurama said quickly. "We'd better stay out of their way; once we start using our powers they won't know us from this scum."

"Yeah they will," Yusuke said cynically. "We're stronger and smarter, so they'll think we're the ringleaders and come after us specifically."

"Stay out of the way of the men with guns," Kuwabara summed it up. "Got it. No problem."

"Right, guys, let's split up," Yusuke commanded, trying to figure all this out as he went. He didn't often have to command the entire team in battle, not strategically, that is. He'd been team captain in the Dark Tournament, but he was beginning to see that said role, which had had rules and customs attendant to it, had almost nothing to do with commanding a free-for-all like this.

"Think we can manage not to trip over each other if I just turn you guys loose?" he asked rhetorically.

"Waiting on your word—and running out of patience," Kurama replied cheerfully, claws tapping the wood of the stair rail with the air of one analyzing it for its potential as a weapon. This assessment was not too far off, as it happened.

"Try not to bring the building down, OK?" Yusuke added quickly. "That was a great idea in the Tournament, _really_ bad idea here."

From behind him, the Spirit Detective heard a faint, impatient snort, followed shortly by the feeling of someone vanishing abruptly. The air moved differently. Not a second later, there was a sudden attack of dead among a handful of the demons that were swarming up the walls.

"Eh, what the hell am I doing," Yusuke shrugged. "Go kick ass, guys." And he took his own advice, careening into the chaos with a fully charged fist.

As these demons were about as stupid and low class as he ever encountered, minus the insects, imps, and nasty carnivorous bird-things that were one step up from pest control, determining who to hit was much easier than it would have been. Some demons (take Kurama, for example) looked perfectly human and were given away only by their aura or behavior.

But these were just cannon fodder. They existed to fight, kill, and die, with an occasional diversion into eating things. They were nothing but animals with the _potential_, should they survive, to grow a little smarter and a little more powerful. Travel that cycle long enough and you ended up with a demon one step up the ladder, the B-Class, which ranged from 'smart enough to be consciously stupid' to 'not _quite_ godlike powers'.

If there was a force controlling them, Yusuke couldn't sense it. The auras in the atrium were either human, C-Class demon, or his gang, with several anomalies he really didn't have the time to deal with or even think about.

Yusuke paused for a moment, having cleared a reasonably empty space around him, and assessed the situation. There were still demons pouring out of a hole in the ground: bad. There were notably less than before: good. His team members were nowhere in sight: dubious, probably good. It wasn't like he needed their help right here and now.

_Now, if we could just get all the humans out of here,_ he thought, _we could have free range to just wipe out everything left inside. How could I go about doing that?_

He jumped as a noise not connected directly to humans screaming, demons howling and/or screeching, or the buzz of his own Spirit Energy intruded on his ears. After a split-second of puzzlement, he realized that it was the wail of sirens.

_Police?_ he thought incredulously. _Whose bright idea was that?_

After a few seconds of thought, interrupted briefly to illustrate to an unusually stupid demon why staying away from him was a good idea right at this point, he amended his thoughts to _Good! More people with guns! And I bet they know how to get all these people out of here!_

What actually happened was this:

There was a detachment of police cars screeching up the road, but they were serving only as escort to the squad of what would prove to be military vehicles. The first four that Yusuke saw through the broken doors contained soldiers in camouflage uniforms and with very business-like guns. The fifth, and possibly the sixth, was definitely a tank.

A man jumped out of one of the leading police cars. What Yusuke failed to notice before it was too late was that he jumped out of the passenger seat, rather indicating that he wasn't police.

This man accepted a megaphone from a subordinate who had leapt to the man's side at top speed. He didn't even watch as his troops deployed themselves, with much shouting, around the conference center, scattering out among the grounds. This would seem to indicate either arrogance or confidence, and that is a fine, fine line.

The man, who, by his uniform, was a high-ranking military officer, placed the megaphone to his lips and announced at full volume:

"_Attention. Attention. This is Colonel Keith Senesky of the United States Military. This building is now under quarantine. Do not attempt to leave the building. Repeat, do not attempt to leave the building. Violators will be shot. This is your only warning. Violators will be shot."_

_Oh, shit!_ Yusuke thought. _We're locked in!_

And the demons kept coming from the abyss in the ground.

_(To be continued.)_

* * *

**Next Chapter: **The battle concludes, and the dust settles. Several characters meet each other, and promptly begin to argue. There is an announcement. It is wrong on a number of points, and completely accurate on many others. 


	8. 1'7: Reported Alive

**Chapter Seven: Reported Alive**

**Author's Note:** I have to make these chapters shorter, because they're taking too much out of me at their previous size. On the plus side, that should make chapters faster, as they won't be so colossal to tackle all at once.

**Disclaimer: **In this chapter, I don't own: men with guns; pepper spray, at least right at this moment; the Togashi phrase 'pug-ugly'; giant mutant earthworms, thank God, although they were my idea; a hole in the ground (really); a camera; a microphone; a TV station; any tanks at all; or the people that shouldn't have been even in this _universe_ but snuck in here anyway, even though the last time they got stuck in someone else's universe they almost got killed! (Again.) I didn't invite them, I swear. Oh, and I don't own Yu Yu Hakusho. But I do own lots of sarcasm.

**ON WITH THE SHOW!**

Yusuke paid for his temporary lapse of attention as some demon got in a lucky shot, knocking the breath out of his lungs. Wheezing, Yusuke swiped back at it, glowing fist intercepting its head and sending it spinning.

He straightened up with effort, surveying the battlefield. The tide of demons emerging from the blasted-out pit in the rough center of the room was lessening somewhat, a good sign that there weren't many more to come.

What humans had been in the large, open atrium at the time when the tunnel had opened were still either screaming or gibbering, minus those who had fainted; run deeper into the building; or been killed by demonic forces. He couldn't see the woman with the pepper spray that he'd noticed in passing, or, come to think of it, the couple who had been finding creative uses for fire extinguishers. In the breaths between blows, he guessed that the former was probably dead, the latter pair escaped. Somehow he pegged them as the sort of people to be able to do that.

Reflexively, he ducked as the sound of gunfire—actual, real, substantial metal gunfire—erupted around him. Hands covering his head, he glared around, mouth gaping, at the wide wall of windows. One of the glass doors swung back and forth, bouncing around from the impact of a barrage of shells.

Yusuke could smell blood—human blood. It sounded like the army, which had oh-so-conveniently decided to park on their doorstep all of a sudden, had decided to take a hand.

"You're shooting at the wrong people, assholes!" Yusuke yelled in their general direction, because he never could miss an opportunity to yell at people in authority, and the United States Military was setting a new personal standard for him.

He was answered by another barrage, and the renewed attention of a flock of demons. Yusuke swore and took them all out with one blow, resolving out loud to mention how useful that Shotgun technique was to Genkai while simultaneously knowing he'd never do any such thing.

"Stupid demons!" he swore at them all, brandishing his fists. "Come on!"

It was a mark of how stupid these really were that they actually took him up on that. Personally, Yusuke was beginning to think that his team's analysis of this mob as C-Class had been overly generous. At least some C-Class could think, talk, crack jokes, and stay out of the way, while being about as powerful as your average light bulb. These pug-ugly underground creatures didn't have the brains Nature gave a carrot.

All the same, Yusuke was perfectly content to run around and beat the crap out of them. Undercover work was not his forte; the closest he'd willingly come to it before this was sneaking around trying to find out where those stupid copycat creatures that had decided to spoof him and Kuwabara were hiding.

Speaking of Kuwabara, where was he?

* * *

It had occurred to Kuwabara, as he ran down the stairs at Urameshi's side, that the vast majority of the general area would not be able to even see his Spirit Sword, as it was an extension of psychic energy, not a physical sword. So, it followed logically, if he went into his usual routine of noble posing and arrogant declarations, he'd look really _stupid_.

For now, he skipped the wind-up and just brought his golden sword swiping through the nearest demon, which he figured had to be the ugliest thing he'd seen since super-Toguro at the Dark Tournament. And up till now he'd thought that _nothing_ could be uglier than that jerk.

Oh well, live and learn.

More things he was learning included that Urameshi obviously had the atrium under control and would probably resent someone else trying to help out. He had already lost track of Hiei, and he'd seen Kurama shoot past him, hot on the tail of something long, undulating, and screeching.

Kazuma Kuwabara swung his sword back and mowed his way through to the biggest hallway with lamentable ease. God, demons were stupid. Most demons, he amended. A statement like that, out loud, would make him the instant target of deadpan sarcasm; probably along the lines of _if_ **we're** _stupid, what are_ **you?**

"Dammit!" Kuwabara shouted at the nearest demon, which stared at him with one heavily clawed paw left hanging in the air with puzzlement. "I'm hallucinating annoying short demons inside my head!"

Seeing that he'd probably fatally confused the creature, he settled the matter with a short sword stroke at head level, leaving the demon, its head, and its hand behind.

Like everyone else in the building, he heard when the army arrived. They made it very easy to hear them.

Kuwabara started to get worried about then.

Demons didn't scare him. Men with guns didn't scare him. (His sister scared him, but that's beside the point, because Shizuru scared everybody.) But the impending arrival of the army made him just a bit nervous, because if _he_ were Colonel Keith Whatever His Name Was, _he'd_ just gas the whole place and sort out demons and humans then.

Kuwabara really hoped Colonel Whatever didn't think the same way he did, but the sound of bullets against thick, but not thick enough, glass crushed that hope pretty flat.

He swore aloud as someone jostled him in passing, running on a one-way trip to nowhere screaming his head off. There were so many damn people! Why couldn't some of them been out ordering pizza or something, he wanted to know. They were everywhere, some of them even running toward the demons in their panic.

An ear-piercing screech from the other end of the hall sent even the stupidest and most frantic running in the other direction. Suddenly, Kuwabara found himself fighting against a river of people reeking of fear and sweat and other, nastier, things, all trying to push him along with them. He was struggling just to hold his ground, and was forced to vanish away his Spirit Sword to avoid impaling them on something they couldn't even see to avoid, however tempting that may have been at that exact moment.

Seconds later, on the heels of another screech, he saw the reason everyone else had run away. The demon coiling its way toward him might have been a serpent in another life, might have been a dragon, but right now, and having spent heaven knows how long underground, it just looked like a really, really big albino earthworm with about thirteen too many legs, although any amount of legs is too many when you're talking about earthworms, even mutant demon ones.

It was the source of the intermittent screeches, its way of protesting the sudden influx of too much light and sound. The screams were hurting Kuwabara's ears extremely.

Shoving free of the mob, which had mostly pushed past him only to encounter Urameshi's Atrium Arena, side order of Army, Kuwabara summoned his Spirit Sword and prepared to filet the demon earthworm into little bits. Surely, something that big and nasty couldn't move very fast.

He was wrong. With the new source of light coming its way, the demon earthworm released a particularly shrill squeak and, lowering its head, jetted off down an adjacent corridor at a rate of knots.

One moment after the head moved, Kurama landed where it had just been. Pulling elongated claws out of the cracked and broken tile, he said a word Kuwabara hadn't thought he knew and brushed them off against his shirt.

"Problems, Red?" Kuwabara asked, lowering his sword and moving to his friend's side.

"It's fast," the fox hissed, biting off his words angrily, "and I don't have enough room to use my whip the way I'd like to. There are just too many humans!"

"You're telling me! You get rid of one group and another runs in from some other hall!"

Kurama wasn't quite listening. "I think I'll sic it on Hiei, next time I see him. He can deal with it. What were you saying?"

"Nothing. Where is Hiei?"

"At any given second, who knows? Are there any other people with Spirit power around?"

Kuwabara shrugged one shoulder, keeping his sword steady. "I can't tell. There's too much interference."

"Agreed. I can smell fear and sweat, earth and blood all in equal quantities, but just as soon as I get that sorted out, I get bits of other scents. I thought I smelled Reikai earlier, and there's something or someone around that doesn't smell like _anything_ I know."

From somewhere down the hall, the worm screeched. Kurama winced and put his hands over his ears. "That doesn't help either."

Kuwabara turned to take the latest wave of demons. "You go get it; I've got your back," he called over his shoulder as the fox sped away.

About then, the army decided to take a hand.

* * *

Outside, one man cycled through the frequencies on his radio, trying to page one specific man. After several aborted attempts, he found the right channel.

"Hey, Pete, you there?"

Over the radio, he heard first a burst of static, and then an actual reply. "What?"

"Don't you think we should do something?"

"Like what?" his comrade in arms snapped back, and then added, "Oh, no. No, no, no, that's a negative, all that shit. We are not going to break ranks."

"But we could help—"

"We are helping. We're keeping it contained. I know you want to go in there swinging, but you do that and I'm not helping you explain why they're _not_ hauling your dead ass outta there."

The lieutenant sighed regretfully into his radio. "I just don't see what the point of joining this outfit is if we don't get to fight for a bit."

"How about anonymity? Or is that too big a word for you, Selkirk? The colonel can sort it out without any interference from us. Demons or not, we stay normal. Otherwise, what's the point?"

* * *

Kuwabara flinched as a wave of sound, this time from outside, ever so briefly silenced the screaming crowd. It was the sound of many large vehicles getting ready to move, and it was accompanied by gunfire.

And this time, Kuwabara was ready to guess, they weren't firing warning shots. These sounded real.

In the middle of a pause in the battle, he lowered his sword and listened, wondering what was going on and whether he should be running to help or getting out of the way.

"You! Boy!"

Automatically, Kuwabara swung around, one fist rising aggressively. "Whaddya mean, _boy_? 'You!' yourself!" It was admittedly not one of his better comebacks, but the man had caught him by surprise.

The man, grey-haired and limping somewhat, glared right back. "Report!" he snapped. He was wearing a camera around his neck.

Kuwabara was beginning to really hate this man in much the same way he'd objected to Yusuke Urameshi the first day (well, the first few seconds) they'd met. Namely, _the guy just pissed him off._

"Go yell at someone else, gramps, I'm busy! In case you haven't noticed, there're a bunch of crazy _monsters_ running around!"

"Why do you think I'm yelling? Don't put that sword away, you idiot!"

Kuwabara's eyes widened comically, almost trying to hide his Spirit Sword behind his back reflexively, as if that would help. He stopped himself before he was impaled on his own sword. "You can see it?"

The man sighed, rubbed his forehead, and shook his head. "Look, boy, let's make a deal. You don't act like I'm stupid, and I'll promise to do the same thing. Yes, I can."

Kuwabara put two and two together and got fifteen. "Hey!" he brightened up, "You must be our backup! You got some kind a weapon on you? 'Cause we need it."

"Actually," the man said, "I think you're _my_ backup. Tyrone Raimund, demon fighter," he introduced himself over a renewed sequence of crashes.

Flinching, Kuwabara looked up at the ceiling, which was in pieces and showing too many pipes to be entirely flattering. "That's nice. What?" His brain caught up with his ears. "You're a demon hunter? No offence, gramps, but aren't you a little, um, well…"

Raimund glared at him. "Perhaps I should have said demon hunter, retired, involuntarily re-conscripted."

"What? Keep it short, Raimund, we're gonna be under attack any minute now."

"I said I don't fight demons anymore, but now I've been recruited. By the spirit world. I trust you know about them?"

Kuwabara snorted. "Know about them? I freakin' work for them, man!"

The elderly man actually smiled. "Perfect. Did they send you to keep the Sato information under control?"

"Yeah, how'd you know?"

"Because so am I, now. Look, I'll explain it later, if we're both still alive. Right now I need a second pair of eyes."

Waving his free hand, Kuwabara asked cautiously, "Wait, first let me clear something up. You're working for the Spirit World?"

Raimund considered all possible replies and settled for "Yes."

"All right then, let's go. You lead, and I'll eliminate any demons we meet—" Kuwabara recollected a phrase he'd heard on TV and finished with "with extreme prejudice."

* * *

They reached conference room ten, home base of the demonic exposé, without any major incident, although they did encounter several small bands of discombobulated underground demons. Kuwabara got to fulfill his promise of extreme prejudice, but despite his claims at being a former demon hunter, Raimund did nothing but watch.

"So how does this work from here on?" Kuwabara asked, returning from eliminating a nearby trio of demons and rejoining Raimund at the door embossed with _10_. In the meantime, he had finally remembered where he'd seen Raimund before. "Because, just breaking in didn't work last time."

Raimund muttered something that sounded remarkably like "Bitch," before adding, "How do you know about that?"

"Successful espionage!" Kuwabara proclaimed happily. Coming down a little, he admitted, "I was sneaking around too, only I did it quietly."

"Well," Raimund said as meditatively as possible under the circumstances, "I was planning on opening the door and stunning everyone inside. By now, they should be setting up for their presentation, so all the information should be right there. Between the two of us, we should be able to steal or destroy it all."

"Oh, so that's why you needed a second person," Kuwabara groused, accurately realizing that 'between the two of us' meant 'you do the lifting and I'll supervise'.

"You'll be getting your job done, won't you? Now, close your eyes, else the stun will get you too."

"The what?"

"Just do it."

Kuwabara grumbled a little more, but obeyed. "Ready."

"Here goes." Kuwabara could hear the door opening. The rise in noise level this produced was abruptly lowered by the utter lunacy of someone coming in right now.

To the Japanese youth's surprise, Raimund said, "Smile, everyone." Personally, Kuwabara would have gone with something more along the lines of "Hands up, and nobody move!"

There was a very bright flash visible even through the double layer of eyelids and hands.

"All right, you can open your eyes now," Raimund told him.

He did. "What was that?"

Raimund was swinging the camera formerly around his neck from one hand freely. "Little compensation gift from the idiot who put me on this job. Stun camera. Amazing the dumb but useful things the spirits come up with."

"You're telling me," Kuwabara agreed absently, gaping at the room full of TV equipment, demonic displays, and unconscious people. "They gave my team leader a communicator that looks like a makeup compact. He loses it all over town about three times a week, minimum. They'd take it out of his pay, except we don't get paid."

"Right." Raimund brushed his hands together busily. "Let's get to work."

Kuwabara was still looking at the people. "I don't see that demon woman," he pointed out. "And are any of these Kobayashi-maru Sato?"

Raimund paused in what he was doing, namely exposing camera film. "You're right. Neither one of them is here. And there actually isn't very much stuff. Bones and all that. I wonder why not?"

* * *

Persis Iolani, demoness in disguise, had figured out within seconds of the interfering man's arrest that he was going to be back before very long. So she had taken steps to keep ahead of him.

It had been inconvenience itself getting the presentation, even if it was no longer to be to a live audience, moved to another room on the other end of the complex. _She_ had wanted it moved to another zip code, maybe even another county, but just try convincing 'Yashi that was necessary. He'd made hell's own fuss about moving the presentation anyway.

She was beginning to feel as if she were either in a late-night horror flick that was horrific only in the fact that it was horrible—the type of movie with a gloating bad guy in a black trench coat and dark glasses set and a convenient tank of piranhas—or a British farce.

It was just too perfect, in a coldly practical sort of way, that just after they'd begun filming, as 'Yashi first broached the subject of a newly discovered phylum of creatures, the entire building shook.

He stopped, stared around. Persis cut the camera just in time. She didn't think, somehow, they'd have time to edit this.

"What was that?" he asked.

Persis immediately decided, without any remorse, to do some creative manipulation. In essence, she was going to lie like a rug and hope that he bought it.

"This morning I got a phone call," she said, trying for just the right mix of sincere and scared. The scared was real, but not for the same reason as his fear. "I don't know who it was, but they said that there was going to be an attack. That we were in danger, and that all this information was going to be destroyed."

"Huh?" 'Yashi said.

Oh, she didn't have time to explain. Right now they just needed to finish the presentation and get the film out on the streets. They needed—_SHE_ needed—the general public to know. "'Yashi!" she cried. "Remember my theory? The one I told you about?"

"Not now, darling," he said distractedly, catching part of a skeleton as it threatened to fall.

"Yes, now! 'Yashi, I was telling you the truth! There are live ones out there, I can feel them! Live _demons_!"

'Yashi gaped. "You're kidding. Live ones?"

"Yes. Demons."

"Real actual demons, like from legends?"

"Exactly like. 'Yashi, you've got to skip right to the end. Where you talk about the parallel worlds, and parallel life."

'Yashi scratched his head and flipped through his notes. "Yeah, honey, I never understood why you insisted on putting that in there…"

"Because it's true." Persis Iolani, _nee_ Prrrrsssh, stamped her feet impatiently. "It's all true. Now get back on camera and _present_, or by God I'll steal it out from under you."

He stared at her. She stared back.

'Yashi resettled his notes and dragged the skeleton and one of the models, mounted on their stands, over to the panel about the three-world theory Stephanie had gotten permission to reproduce from her contacts at her science magazine. He took up a stance beside the merged displays and nodded, eyes very wide.

"Persis, you had better explain this once we're through. Ready."

Persis sighed with relief, kept a portion of her senses on the door, and resumed filming as battle broke out downstairs.

* * *

Yusuke dropped the demon he was pounding, one of the few that remained, and made tracks for the door to the inner hallways just as the US Military broke in through what remained of the doors. He really didn't need to be stopped and forced to answer questions along the lines of 'what are these things, and what did you do to them?' That would be really inconvenient, and would break the whole 'undercover' thing wide open.

Leaving them to deal with what they found there, he muttered under his breath, "Like undercover matters anymore. The guys better have dealt with whatever got past me, 'cause I _really_ don't want to run into some trash imp at this pace."

He skidded around a corner and stopped at the foot of the stairs to get his bearings. He was no psychic, like Kuwabara, but he could see auras when he looked. And right now, that was no help at all, because not one was in sight.

No demonic aura of the particular pair he was looking for, that is. There were enough human energy signatures packed into little rooms to blind him if he hadn't been used to it. And he couldn't hear Kuwabara anywhere. That speech routine usually made him easy to find.

"Guys!" he yelled, hoping that the demons at least would pick up. "The army's moving in!"

Warning issued, he pounded up the stairs. He was about a third of the way up when he narrowly avoided being run over by something. Or rather, someone.

"Hey, lady, watch it!" Yusuke yelled reflexively, snatching at the broken banister lest he tip over and fall down a flight of stairs. "Falling down a flight of stairs is _not_ on my to-do list today, ya know!"

She barely gave him a glance. Instead, she just kept going.

Yusuke leaned over the banister to yell, "Hey, I'm talking here, lady!" to no avail. Suddenly falling silent in mid-sentence, he realized, "Hey, wait a second," and squinted at the woman's receding back as she ran deeper into the building, carrying a small rectangular case.

She was glowing faintly with an inhuman aura.

"What the hell?" Yusuke said. Just for good measure, he said it again.

A sudden spate of official-sounding shouting interrupted his train of thought, reminding him that he was running away from the army. Resuming his course up the stairs, he tried to remember why she was important.

_Demon woman, demon woman,_ he chanted mentally. _Demon woman in the science fair,_ he'd hated science fairs at school, except when pushing _this_ button _here_ could blow someone else's project up. _Demon woman with a CD case? Now why would she have a CD case in the middle of an attack?_

Emerging on the next level, he stopped, hearing, over someone else cursing fluently, a familiar voice.

"…do you mean, _gone?_ What's gone? Where's it gone?"

"Hey, man," Yusuke greeted, trying to affect his usual casual saunter and failing miserably as he joined Kuwabara in Conference Room Ten. It came out as more of a stumble instead. "What's going on?"

Kuwabara looked down at him. "Well, that guy"—he pointed at the elderly man who was standing in the middle of the room amid heaps of bodies—"was trying to do the same thing we were supposed to."

"Hey, I know you, don't I?" Yusuke called across the room. The man stopped, stared at him.

"You're that—what's his name?—guy who said you were looking for Kobayashi-maru Sato!"

Raimund stared at him. "Who's this, Kuwabara?"

"Oh. Tyrone Raimund, meet Urameshi Yusuke. Sorry, that's Yusuke Urameshi for you. He's our team leader."

Raimund looked vague, then appeared to get himself under control. "Right. Right. You have a whole team here! How many more of you?" he asked Yusuke.

He shrugged. "I don't know where they are."

"Ok. Ok." Raimund seemed to be in the habit of repeating himself when he was trying to think.

Yusuke poked Kuwabara in the side. "Hey! Why are there a lot of knocked-out people on the floor?"

"He's got a stun gun."

"I have a flash camera."

"Yeah, fine, what he said."

"All right. Your team and I are trying to accomplish the same thing, right?"

"Sure," Kuwabara said.

Yusuke pointed out, "Yeah, but you've knocked them all out, so how come we need a plan? Can't we just break it all and go?"

"The important parts of his presentation aren't here," Raimund snapped. "He and that demon woman partner of his have moved it somewhere else!"

"Wait a second." Yusuke's heart sunk. "A demoness ally?"

"Yeah."

"Pale woman, human-looking, dark hair?"

"Right."

"She just ran past me not five minutes ago."

"WHAT?" Kuwabara and Raimund yelled.

Yusuke put his hands up defensively. "I didn't know!"

Kuwabara slapped his hand to his forehead. "We're a hell of a team," he told Raimund. "We just haven't got the teamwork bit down yet."

Yusuke figured that this would be a really good time to change the subject. "The people are waking up," he pointed out. "Can we move this somewhere else?"

"Good idea, Urameshi," Kuwabara agreed. "Come on if you're coming, Raimund."

Raimund followed them as they adjourned to one of the lounges. It was mostly intact, and there were only four people hiding in it. All of them screamed and ran out the back door when the temporary detective alliance came in.

Finding a convenient chair, Yusuke propped his sneakers up on the table. "So what now?"

This promising line of inquiry was postponed when the door opened again and both Hiei and Kurama came to join them, both very dirty, but alive and relatively uninjured.

"What's going on?"

Yusuke grinned. "We're screwed."

"Oh, is that all?"

"Shut up and find a chair, fox-boy."

Any further course of action that would have resulted from this meeting was about to become moot. To their extreme surprise, the TV bolted to the ceiling corner, part of the ever-present electronic system that had been broadcasting announcements and schedules all week, flickered to life.

On screen was a youngish man standing in front of a diorama that was very clearly about demons. It was evident that the film had been shot in a hurry.

No one said a word as Kobayashi-maru ran through his exposé. In under ten minutes of grainy, jumpy film, he outlined the existence of demons; how they were only different, not supernatural, and he was only calling them 'demons' because of their resemblance to such in folklore and old illustrations; how he'd found them; a theory about how more could be found; and the basics of where they came from.

All this was bad, but towards the end was something even worse. When she'd shot the film, Persis Iolani had been forced to leave the room in order to stop a pair of demons from reaching the room her fiancé was recording in. If she hadn't left then, she would have known about the bit he added in, based on his own limited observations. She hadn't had time to review the footage before broadcasting.

"Based on my observations of the demonic skeletons and sole living specimen found in Arizona, this particular branch of animals does not appear to be intelligent. Due to the small skull and limited opportunities for survival in the harsh world which it is adapted for, this species would not have evolved for intelligence. When others of its descendents or relatives are found living, I find it highly unlikely that they would be able to approach the intelligence of a chimpanzee or gorilla, two of humanity's closest relatives, much less that of a human."

About then during the filming, Persis had come back, with no idea of the disaster Kobayashi-maru had just invited.

To make things worse, from the Spirit Detectives' point of view, he mentioned demonic power, too. And the interesting possibilities if similar wavelengths could be generated in a lab—a lab, he added, that he did not have the resources or funding to build or use.

When he'd finished, with the disastrous fact that copies of the film were being sent through various media to other locations and channels, the Spirit Detectives and Tyrone Raimund stared at the freshly blank TV, in shock.

Just like that, the world had changed.

Yusuke summed it up. He was more right than he knew.

"We are _so_ screwed."

* * *

**Next:** The boys get yelled at. The boys do some yelling. They get a new assignment, and are asked not to screw it up this time, please? Just for the novelty value. 


End file.
